Chaos of the Senses (12 page)

Some of them, of course, were officers' wives who'd come out of consideration for me and who were sure to ply me with questions about the incident for fear that some similar ‘surprise' might await their husbands.

However, I hadn't felt like talking for days, and their plush presence only exacerbated my grief.

They were women of ennui with houses so neat they looked as though nobody lived in them, who cooked only the most complicated dishes, whose words were as insincere as they were polite, whose bedrooms were as frigid as they were luxurious, and whose exorbitant wardrobes concealed bodies that no man had ever set on fire.

As for me, I was the woman of worry, the woman of blank pages, unmade beds, dreams that simmer over a low flame, and the chaos that engulfs the senses at the moment of creation. I
was a woman whose clothes consisted of tight-fitting words and statements barely long enough to cover questions' knees.

I'd been a skinny little girl with big questions surrounded by women full of loose answers.

They were still hens that turned in early, clucked a lot, and fed off men's crumbs, pecking at the remains of the love meals they were served when they happened to be available, whereas I was still a woman of silence, a woman of sleeplessness.

So where would I find the words I needed to speak to them of my sorrow?

Fortunately, I was saved by Nasser's arrival. Using him as an excuse, I left the women's gathering and went to sit with him.

So here he was again, at last.

During my five years of marriage he hadn't visited me more than once a year. Our other encounters had taken place either at our house on holidays, at family gatherings, or by mere happenstance (as on this occasion), as though we didn't live in the same city. The last time I had seen him was on the previous Eid al-Fitr. He would usually kiss me warmly when we saw each other. We'd exchange our latest news, and sometimes we would laugh and reminisce together. But that day he'd seemed withdrawn and anxious. Seeing that he didn't seem to want to talk, I'd respected his mood and left.

Nasser was three years my junior, but he'd always been my soulmate. He'd always shared in my joys and sorrows, and in my rebellions, too.

Then suddenly, when I got married, something was broken between us. What we'd had before was replaced by a kind of unspoken reproach on his part. At first I interpreted it as jealousy, since Nasser had been attached to me: I was his whole family, all his
convictions, everything he had to be proud of. He hadn't excelled in school, and when his peers were still pursuing their educations, he was becoming a businessman. He'd rejected the idea that some strange man could come along and rob him of the one thing he'd had to himself. In fact, he rarely uttered my husband's name, as though he didn't want to acknowledge his existence.

I remember bringing it up with him a couple of years ago. I said, ‘I've been married for three years now, and it's time you accepted it. It had to happen.'

His response took me by surprise. ‘It had to happen?' he said ruefully. ‘For them to plunder the country, empty out our bank accounts, commandeer our dreams, then show off their wealth when they can see how miserable we are, maybe that had to happen. But for the bastards to marry our women and trample our martyrs' names in the dust, that didn't have to happen. You made that happen yourself !'

Nasser is twenty-seven years old. He's three years younger than I am, and a cause older.

He came into the world bearing a cause the way we bear names that we didn't choose but that we live up to in the end. During Algeria's war of liberation, my father had developed a fascination for the figure of Abdel Nasser, and he'd wanted to give his son a name that reflected his pan-Arab aspirations. So, without realizing it, he gave him two names of renown: his own name, as that of one of Algeria's most celebrated martyrs, and that of pan-Arabism's greatest leader.

Nasser had shared with the homeland both its orphanhood and a name that was no longer his. Nasser Abd al-Mawla had been the national memory's pampered child. However, he
hadn't necessarily been the child of a pampered nation. He'd been born with a name which, bigger than he was, had draped a cloak of distinction over his shoulders.

And herein lay his tragedy.

It's no easy thing to be the son of a national symbol, and you're bound to feel a chill inside the thick, luxurious coat of fame. What might he have worn under that coat to keep warm in times of disappointment?

What might he have been hiding beneath the burnoose of silence?

I kissed him fervently, speaking to him, as usual, in a Constantinian dialect infused with the vocabulary of motherhood. ‘How are you, little mama?' I gushed. ‘I've missed you so much!'

‘I'm fine, may God give you life,' he replied.

He sat down across from me in his white jubba. I presumed that he'd just come from the mosque or was about to go there, since whenever I saw him he was either between one prayer and another, or between one cause and another.

Wanting to make conversation, I said, ‘I came to say goodbye to Ma. It looks like she'll never get tired of making the pilgrimage!'

‘I told her she'd get a greater reward for donating the money she would have spent on her pilgrimage to the poor in Iraq, but she didn't believe me.'

I didn't say anything more, not knowing how to continue the conversation with him.

Nasser still hadn't recovered from the Gulf War. When Iraq first invaded Kuwait, he'd been divided and unsettled. He'd go to sleep supporting Saddam Hussein, and wake up defending the Kuwaitis.

When worse came to worst and things moved in the direction of a military confrontation with the international alliance against Iraq, he sided once and for all with Saddam, captivated by the notion of ‘the mother of all battles'. Like so many others, he was betting on the impossible, and dreamed of some huge battle in which we'd liberate Palestine!

But after the first missiles Iraq dropped on Israel fell in the middle of the desert, he called me one night and said, ‘So is this the Scud missile Saddam's been threatening the world with? It's nothing but a suppository that Israel's stuck in its rear end!'

I laughed. I hadn't expected the war to have such an impact on him.

Those days were the only period in which Nasser came to see me regularly, maybe just because he needed somebody to vent to. After all, he knew it would be easy enough to infect me with his gloom.

One day, for example, he dropped in and was surprised to find me sitting at my desk writing. We were in the throes of the Gulf War and the insults that came with it, and he started raking me over the coals as though I were committing some sort of crime.

He said, ‘I don't understand how you can go on writing as though none of this were happening! The earth is shaking under your feet and destruction awaits an entire people, and you sit here at your desk. Stop and look at the mess around you. Can't you see there's no point in what you're doing?'

‘But this is what I do,' I said apologetically. ‘I'm a writer!'

‘And because you're a writer you should shut the hell up or go commit suicide!' he sputtered. ‘Within the space of a few weeks we've gone from being a people that had a nuclear arsenal to one that's been stripped of everything but a few
knives. And you sit here writing! We've gone from being a people that had the largest financial reserve in the world to being pathetic tribes that go begging for crumbs in international forums. And you sit here writing! The people you're writing for – do you think they can spare the price of a book? They're waiting for somebody to come give them medicine and a few loaves of bread. As for the rest of them, they're dead. Even the ones who are still alive are dead. So you should mourn them by declaring silence!'

Little did Nasser know that, by saying these things that he may well have changed his mind about since, he would change the course of my writing and force me to keep silence for two whole years.

During those two years I came to despise all those writers who, blithely publishing piece after piece in newspapers and magazines, shamelessly carried on with business as usual as Arabdom lay dead at their feet.

I would turn on US television stations to find ‘live' coverage of Arab soldiers trudging through desert sands on the verge of starvation, falling like flies in trenches of degradation and being sprayed with the shells of meaningless death without knowing why these things were happening to them.

I'd see caravans of refugees fleeing in trucks from one Arab country to another, leaving everything behind after a life of misery and without understanding why.

I'd see Kuwaitis dancing in the streets, waving US flags, kissing pictures of Bush and offering General Schwarzkopf a handful of Kuwaiti soil, and wonder how we'd come to this.

A man who couldn't have cared less about us, who'd never lost a loved one in any of the wars he'd improvised or lost an ounce of his weight during any of the world's famines, would
appear on our television screens in swimming trunks and casually promise us more victories.

During that entire time I couldn't stop thinking about committing suicide, and the only thing that kept me from it was the grief I knew it would cause my mother.

As a matter of fact, I'd dreamed of some sort of big, showy death. I didn't want to die like Khalil Hawi, who'd shot himself in the forehead with a nondescript hunting rifle. As his brothers and neighbours looked on, he'd killed himself on 7 June 1982 in protest against Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Before pulling the trigger he'd said, ‘What's become of this nation of ours? After this pitiful show of weakness, I'm ashamed to call myself an Arab.'

If I had killed myself, I would have wanted to do it in a way that did justice to the grief I felt. I would have wanted my death to be something in the order of the suicide carried out by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima who, shortly after delivering to his publishers the fourth and final book of his
Sea of Fertility
tetralogy, headed out one Sunday morning to complete the final chapter of his life according to a carefully thought-out plan. He'd decided to commit ritual suicide in protest against Japan's humiliating defeat by the United States in World War II and the loss of its national identity in the face of Western supremacy.

Mishima had prepared for his death ahead of time. He'd taken private lessons in wrestling, equestrianism and body-building, which helped to prepare him for a coup attempt in the course of which he went to the Tokyo command of Japan's Ground Self-defence Forces and, together with four of his followers, took its commandant captive. He then delivered a heartfelt speech to more than a thousand Japanese soldiers
gathered there, urging them to reject the post-World War II constitution that prohibits war and forbids Japan to form an army.

When his words failed to meet with the hoped-for response, Mishima went back to the room where he and his four followers had barricaded themselves. He donned a traditional Japanese garment, tying its sashes and securing its buttons with perfect self-composure. He then invited photographers to take pictures of him together with the four chosen members of the small, one-hundred-man militia he'd trained to defend the greatness of Japan. With the photographers still looking on, he stood grasping his banned samurai sword in preparation to commit hara-kiri before kneeling to commit the gruesome deed. He was then decapitated by one of his followers.

I tip my hat to you, Mishima!

Wherever you are, friend, I kiss the brow of your severed head, cast at the feet of your homeland in November 1970 in undying rejection of the ignominy of bowing before America's might.

And I still wonder: Were we being optimistic, or just plain naïve, to ally ourselves with a people so stubbornly determined to go on being defeated that they would achieve one stunning failure after another?

During those days I needed to see Nasser every day if I was to maintain my commitment to Arabdom. He would challenge everything I said, and he refused to let me badmouth any particular Arab regime. His rule was: Either you badmouth all of them, one after another (for reasons he was quite willing to recite to me in great detail, at great length, and ever so persuasively), or you keep your mouth shut! As far as he was concerned,
lambasting one of them and not another was a worse offence than not saying anything at all.

Sometimes he would pass by and spend time with me. Then he would take off, saying, ‘God help this people. Half its leaders are collaborators, and the other half are crazy.' Then, as an afterthought, he'd add, ‘Of course, it would be even worse if they were collaborators, and crazy, too!'

Then suddenly Nasser changed.

He stopped talking to me about the 26 billion dinars that had disappeared from the Algerian state treasury. He stopped talking to me about his friends who, like thousands of students and other young people of Constantine, were prepared to suffer martyrdom in defence of the Iraqi flag. (After the Gulf War began, the phrase
Allahu akbar
, ‘God is greater', had been added to Iraq's flag. This had prompted certain sceptics to suggest that we add the phrase
Allahu ghalib
, ‘God is victor', to the Algerian flag, meaning, in effect, ‘We can't do a thing for you'!) Nor did he talk to me any more about rumours to the effect that Israel had obtained a missile that could reach Algeria, and that it was getting ready to attack Constantine.

The rumour had gained such credence, in fact, that for nearly a month people were poised for war as though they actually hoped it would happen, whether for the satisfaction of fighting for a just cause, or out of a passion for martyrdom.

I don't know whether he'd lost his appetite for conversation, or whether I'd lost my enthusiasm for causes in general, having got to the point where I didn't know what to do with myself.