Chaos of the Senses (18 page)

It reminds me of a man who used to defy death and who, when I worried about him, would make light of my fear, saying, ‘I need to die sometimes in order to realize that I'm still alive.'

Now that life had brought me this much enjoyment, I was afraid of the realization that before it, I'd been among the living dead.

A single kiss, and I found myself discovering life all at once. I also discovered the enormity of what I'd been missing.

I wished I could fill that whole black notebook of mine with nothing but a description of that defining moment, the moment that had marked the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another. I wished I could freeze it, or embalm it inside of time.

I wished I had the hands and the talent of Auguste Rodin so that I could immortalize two lovers for whom time had come to an eternal standstill in a moment of passion that took them up into another world, fused in a kiss of stone. If only, like Proust in his masterpiece,
In Search of Lost Time
, I could spend twenty pages doing nothing but describing a single kiss!

Was it because Proust's kiss hadn't really happened and had ended, after his lengthy narrative, on the beloved's cheek, that he was able to describe it in such detail?

And was it because Rodin wasn't entirely devoted to Camille Claudel, the sculptress whose stormy affair with him may have contributed to her ending up in the mental institution where she died, that he wanted to compensate for her absence by creating a statue which, in its unsettling nakedness, immortalized a kiss they would never again share?

Is an early experience of betrayal a condition for creativity? Is coming back empty-handed the only thing that can fill a book?

It didn't matter to me to answer such questions. Besides, I couldn't have answered them even if I'd tried.

The desire that had now taken me over was preventing me from thinking. It was setting me on fire, singeing my fingers, making it impossible to write. Of course, it might actually have forced me to write if it hadn't been for the telephone that sat nearby and which, by means of a magical six-digit number, could provide me with an instant dose of love and affection that would make it pointless to conjure my beloved by sitting in front of a piece of paper!

So I went over to the telephone to call him. As I did so, I thought about what a loss to literature had been caused by this modern gadget. How many an exquisite text and how many a love letter will never be written because of that deadly word, ‘Hello'!

Before I'd lifted the receiver, the phone rang. I jumped. It was my husband on the line. So the word ‘Hello' can put illusions to death, too!

It was a hurried exchange, as though we were continents apart, or as though his telephone bill weren't paid by the government.

So be it, then! I thought. He was always in a hurry. Maybe it was events around him that were in a hurry, since he was telling me to come back to Constantine in two days' time. He told me that given the deteriorating security situation in the capital, I'd be flying back rather than returning in the car.

When I asked him what to do about the driver, he said, ‘He'll bring the car back after taking you and Farida to the airport. I've reserved seats for the two of you on the 9:30 a.m. flight.'

He hung up, and I sat there, frozen.

I'd been expecting to return to Constantine, of course, with Eid al-Adha just three days away. However, I'd expected some miracle or emergency that would make my husband ask me to stay until my mother got back from the pilgrimage, which would have given me a chance to see that man again, if even just once.

With time close on my heels, I was all the more anxious to call him.

Six digits later, the telephone began to ring. And only two rings after that, as though it had been waiting for me, a voice came over the line, saying, ‘Did you get home safely?'

‘Yes. How about you?'

‘I haven't left the house. I decided it would be better to soak up certain places' memory of you. This house is still haunted by your scent. It must be your polite way of punishing me!'

‘I didn't punish you on purpose.'

‘Well, you might have, if you'd read about what Josephine did to Napoleon when he forced her out of the palace.'

‘What did she do?'

‘She sprayed her perfume all over his room to make sure he'd be surrounded by her for a full fifteen days even though he was with another woman. And before that, Cleopatra used to spray the sails of her ship with her perfume as a way of leaving a trail of fragrance behind her wherever she went.'

‘All right, then,' I said, laughing. ‘I'll keep that in mind for the next time!'

After a pause, he replied, ‘There won't be a next time.'

‘Why?' I asked, distressed.

His voice even despite my agitation, he said, ‘Because I'm leaving tomorrow.'

‘Are you going to Constantine?'

‘No, to France.'

‘To France!' I cried, incredulous. ‘What are you going to do there?'

‘What everybody else does when they go there,' he said with a laugh.

‘But you . . . .'

‘But I'm not like them,' he said, finishing my sentence for me. ‘Isn't that what you were going to say? I'm a creature of ink that travels between your notebooks and in your company alone. I might go back and forth between Constantine and the capital, but I wouldn't go anywhere else. And I have no right to buy a ticket for myself and go somewhere without you.'

After a pause, he continued, ‘But I'm not the hero you think I am. Your heroes and heroines don't get sick or grow old. As for me, Madame, I'm sick and tired.'

Suddenly alarmed, I said, ‘What's wrong?'

He replied with a kind of sorrowful derision, ‘I'm tired of standing up. I've spent my whole life standing up, since I'm no good at sitting on principles.'

I didn't try to understand what he was saying. The only question that mattered to me was, ‘When are you coming back?'

‘I don't know. I'm a man who's always in transit.'

‘But I care about your life.'

‘Which life do you mean?' he shot back sarcastically.

I didn't say anything. I didn't understand what he meant.

‘I haven't been successful in life,' he went on, ‘so my hope now is that I might be successful in death. Could you give me a sweet death if life lets me down in the last scene?'

‘What are you saying?' I shouted. ‘Just a few hours ago we were happy, talking about love. So where did all this pessimism come from?'

‘Since you care about love, you must care about death, too. Love and death are the two greatest puzzles in the world. They're alike in their inscrutability, their fierceness, their unexpectedness, their meaninglessness, and the questions they raise. We come and we go without knowing why we loved one person and not another, why we die on one day and not another, or why we die here, now. We also don't know why we're the ones who die, and not others. This is why love and death alone fuel all the literature in the world, since apart from these two themes, there's nothing worth writing about.'

What he'd said got me to thinking, and I sank into a silence that was interrupted by his voice:

‘Do you know what I thought about as I was kissing you today?'

‘What?'

‘I thought about how, if kisses die the way we do, then the best time to die would be during a kiss.'

‘Amazing. Would you believe that when I got back to the house I got out my notebook and wrote, “There are kisses which, if you don't die during them, you don't deserve to survive”?'

He registered a moment of silence, as though he were savouring the idea, delving deep into it.

Then he said, ‘You've realized on your own that unless we come straight up against death, we'll never experience a love sublime enough to be called true passion.'

I sat there without saying anything, like a student who's trying to memorize a lesson being taught by a professor whose entire curriculum consists of his shifting moods, and who, in the space of a single day, has to master one lesson on desire, a second on death, a third on love, and a fourth on how someone can kiss a
woman with perfect passion, then abandon her with perfect indifference!

This is all I can recall of that conversation.

I don't remember him saying anything romantic after that or leaving me a new telephone number or address.

All he said was that the fragrance of that stolen time still hung about him. Then he drew the conversation to a close by saying apologetically that he needed to get some sleep before his trip.

I understood from what he'd said that I'd be able to call him the next day so that we could talk one last time.

At seven o'clock the next morning, still half-asleep after a troubled night, I dialled his number. The ring of the telephone sounded like someone crying, with no one on the other side of memory to silence it. It was the tragicomedy of love, repeating itself without end.

Only now would silence be able to weep.

Chapter Four

Inevitably

W
E ALWAYS ARRIVE AT
love just a bit late.

Then we knock cautiously on somebody's heart, apologizing before the fact for a sentiment that we know will vanish the minute it appears.

Love repeats itself in various forms, with beginnings that give birth to lofty dreams, and with precipitous, excruciating endings. So we learn to expect love's drunken driver to deliver us to disappointment's door.

The dream matures by necessity, but before the time is ripe. So what use is it for the heart to grow up so fast?

When Eid al-Adha arrived, Constantine was awaited by another sort of occasion.

I returned to the city, my heart suffering from multiple fractures. As I struggled out from under the wreckage of a dream, gasping for breath beneath a massive heap of illusions, Constantine presented me with a face I didn't recognize. Its streets were piled high with refuse, since the Islamists had
commandeered the rubbish collectors' dustcarts to force them to join the open strike, leaving the city's stray cats to celebrate the holiday alone.

I was in a hurry to get back to my house, where all I could hear was the city's loud bustle as it prepared for its holiday, and the bleating of the sheep awaiting slaughter the next morning.

I'd always hated holidays, and this one promised to be the saddest of them all. It was a holiday of absence. The feeling of absence came over me as I woke up on the morning of Eid, since there was nobody in the house, other than the maid, to wish a happy holiday. There wasn't anybody to call, either, except for Uncle Ahmad's wife, whose voice over the phone made me feel all the sadder since it revived my feeling of guilt towards her.

My husband had left the house early in anticipation of possible demonstrations or unrest after the end of the holiday prayer. Farida had gone as usual to spend the day with her family. My mother wasn't back from the pilgrimage yet, and Nasser wasn't at home to answer the telephone when I called. Even the sheep, which had been outside in the yard, weren't there any more. Or, rather, all that was left of them were blood stains on the ground and carcasses hung up on hooks and being skinned by a butcher.

What do people do on the morning of the holiday but attack sheep's carcasses: skinning them, cutting them to pieces, dividing them up? No one here, no matter how limited his means or humble his abode, could conceive of Eid al-Adha without slaughtering a sheep. So I was used to seeing people scurrying around on the morning of Eid al-Adha, the men to the open areas set up specially for the ritual slaughter, and the women to
their kitchens, where they would divide up the animals, keep the parts they needed, and distribute the rest as alms.

That particular year I expected the need for alms distribution to be greater than ever. The price of a single sheep came to over 10,000 dinars, which meant that an animal purchased as a sacrifice for the holiday was now worth more than a human being, who could be slaughtered for the price of a bullet.

I called my husband to wish him a happy holiday. I sensed that he was surprised by my call, and maybe even pleased. When I asked him if he'd sent anything to Uncle Ahmad's house, he said he'd been so busy he'd forgotten, so I told him I'd take care of it. Before I could say anything else, another telephone rang in his office and our conversation was cut short.

I asked the driver to take half a sheep's carcass to the poor man's house. Then, when he was about to leave, I ran after him and asked him to take me to the cemetery first.

Only rarely have I visited my father's grave on the morning of Eid al-Adha. I've always preferred to go there alone, the way one goes to a love tryst.

I don't like to visit him on social occasions, maybe because of all the times I've had to share him with others. Often, when I've crossed a street or passed a school named after him, I've been stricken with a sense of orphanhood so overwhelming that it's nearly drowned out the pride I feel in bearing his name.

Between me and the man resting beneath that marble headstone there'd been a kind of tacit understanding. After he died, I'd built a little shrine to him inside of me that had nothing to do with the prestige attached to the standing he'd enjoyed in our society. It was a shrine that grew in size with every passing year
with the result that, in his absence, he became larger than life, and larger by far than the living who surrounded me.

Every now and then I would sit at that shrine the way some women sit at the shrine of a saint, telling him their woes and asking for his blessing and for strength to cope with life's tribulations.

Sometimes I'd close the door to my room and, opening my memory chest, tell him about all the things that grieved me and the mistakes I had made. I'd invite him to sit on the edge of my bed and tell him things that had happened to me. I'd ask for his advice, expecting him to answer me, and when his picture didn't say anything in reply I'd burst into tears.

I'd be afraid that I'd told him too much about myself. I'd be afraid I'd lost his approval. After all, there's nothing more difficult than to remain in the good graces of the dead.

Now, too, like all the times when destiny had caused me anguish and life had let me down, my steps led me to that same patch of ground, where I went digging for answers to my endless questions.

But this time I found no answers. All I found was Nasser, who was about to leave the cemetery. What made it even more surprising to see him there was that it had never been his custom to visit our father's grave on holidays. In fact, my mother had once told me that he'd given her a legal ruling according to which visiting graves and shrines was objectionable.

As usual, I didn't argue with him about his beliefs or ask him why he'd come. Instead I simply expressed my surprise at finding him there, and told him how happy I was to see him. However, as I kissed him, I couldn't help but comment on the fact that he looked different somehow, although I couldn't put my finger on what it was that had changed.

With a touch of sarcasm he replied, ‘I've lost a lot of weight lately.'

Then he added, ‘. . . so that I wouldn't lose my beliefs!'

Not understanding what he meant, I said brightly, ‘Well, that's better. You look younger this way.'

In the same sarcastic tone he said, ‘And what's so great about looking younger?'

So here he was again, drawing me into a conversation about something that wasn't going to be easy to talk about. It reminded me of the time, a few years earlier, when I'd asked him to take the wall clock to get it fixed because it was losing a few minutes every week or so.

In a mocking sort of tone, he'd said to me, ‘Come on, you! We're a whole century behind the rest of the world, and you're sitting in front of a clock counting minutes? If we took it to the repairman, he'd die laughing. After all, people in this country only bring him clocks when they're about to go to jail!'

I wanted to avoid getting into an argument I knew he was sure to win. He responded to my way of thinking about life with his way of coexisting with it, so he always had right on his side.

‘I've been on a trip,' I said apologetically. ‘I just got back a couple of days ago. I called you this morning to wish you a happy holiday, but you weren't home.'

‘I'm not staying in the house,' he replied. ‘As you can see, we're all on a trip. The dead are the only ones with permanent addresses now!'

Then, after a slight pause, he went on, ‘That's because they don't have anything to worry about any more, and nothing to be afraid of.'

‘So what are you afraid of ?' I asked.

‘Of God! And God alone!' he shot back confidently, as if I'd been accusing him.

‘We're all afraid of God,' I said.

‘How can somebody who obeys his enemies claim to fear God?'

I kept my mouth shut, not because I didn't have a reply to what he'd said, but because as far as I was concerned, arguing at a graveside on a religious holiday was nothing short of madness. After all, we hadn't come here to fight. We'd come to recite the Fatihah over our deceased father's grave. But politics seemed to haunt us wherever we went: in our beds, in our notebooks, even in cemeteries.

Finally I said, ‘Nasser, dear brother, people come together today to wish each other a happy holiday, to make up, to forgive each other. But I've barely said hello to you before you blow up in my face. Can't you please just be my brother, if only on this holiday?'

‘What holiday?' he said, Scrooge-like. ‘Look around you at these graves. They're all new, fresh. Every day this cemetery receives a new batch of innocents.'

‘And what fault is that of mine?'

‘Your fault is that you share a bed and a house with the Devil!'

I said, ‘I don't know whether this man is an angel or a devil. As far as I can see, the only difference between him and others is that he's a high-ranking officer who's responsible for defending the homeland, and I believe in the homeland more than I believe in either angels or devils.'

‘Doesn't it bother you to be held by somebody with blood on his hands? On his orders innocent people are thrown in prison and these graves are filled to overflowing. What's the use of all you've learned about people's freedom to choose their destiny?'

‘What I've learned hasn't done me any good. I don't know how to choose my own destiny, much less anybody else's. There are more than sixty officially recognized parties whose job it is to represent the people and defend their choices. But I don't have a party to defend me. Even you, you've never asked me my opinion on anything. So why are you so surprised that I don't have an opinion now?'

He kept quiet at first, as though he didn't know what to say, or didn't see any use in talking.

Then, his voice tender as though he were whispering a farewell, he said, ‘I'm afraid for you, Hayat.'

‘Afraid of what?' I murmured.

‘Of everything.'

With the same tenderness I replied, ‘You've always worried about me.'

‘But this time,' he said, ‘I know what I'm talking about. Leave that man. Since you don't have any children by him, ask for a divorce.'

I smiled. Then I laughed out loud at what he'd said.

‘What's so funny?' he demanded.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I was just thinking about Ma. If she heard you say what you just said, she'd blow her top. My being married to this man is the biggest feather in her cap!'

‘Don't worry about our mother. Her whole life revolves around one thing: what other people think. But the wall she's leaning on for support is just one big illusion. Lean on God in all your decisions, and He won't let you down.'

‘I've always leaned on Him,' I said, ‘and on the person lying in this grave. And this is what's led me to where I am. I would have liked you to be my support, too. You're all I've got in this world. But here we are, bumping into each other in a cemetery
by coincidence like strangers. You don't call and you don't come to see me. And when I come to see you, you're not around.'

‘One of these days,' he interrupted me ruefully, ‘you won't have any trouble finding me. I'll have a permanent address right here.'

‘What are you talking about?' I cried. ‘Are you out of your mind?'

‘Death is closer than you think,' he broke in. ‘Would you like to see the grave of a friend of mine who was murdered a few days ago for no reason? He was near a policeman, and they got suspicious of him because he put his hand in his pocket and looked as though he was about to take something out of it. So they shot him. Then they discovered that he hadn't had anything in his pocket. Imagine: You could die not because of some crime you committed, but because, if you happen to look a certain way when you're in a certain place at a certain time, you're assumed to be a criminal. In other words, we're all potential suspects. All it takes for them to convict us is for time, place and appearance to work against us!'

I said, ‘I don't think people want to hurt each other or commit murders just for the fun of it. But everybody thinks it's either kill or be killed. We don't trust each other any more. We're living in a time when evil's pull is stronger than ever, and we've got to resist being swept along with the tide. Life is good, Nasser. Believe me. We've just got to put a little love into it.'

Nasser was quiet for a while. Then he put his arms around me and said, ‘Sometimes I wish I were like you.'

‘I always wish I were like you. Life has pulled us apart sometimes, but nothing will ever separate us. Isn't that right?'

‘Right. We'll never let that happen.'

He started to walk away. Then he came back as though he'd remembered something, or as though he'd decided to tell me something he'd been hesitating to mention. He whispered, ‘Try to come to the house in the next couple of days. Ma's due back from the pilgrimage the day after tomorrow. Once she's back, I'll be leaving, and I want to say goodbye to you.'

‘You're leaving?' I asked, astonished. ‘Where are you going?'

‘I'll tell you later. Don't say anything about this to anybody.'

As soon as he'd disappeared, I collapsed at the foot of the grave, and before I knew it, I was in tears.

What kind of a time was this, when a brother and sister would meet up by chance in a cemetery on Eid al-Adha morning, fight and make up within ear's range of the dead, then part, not knowing when they'd be seeing each other again, or in which world?

* * *

I, who had gone that day looking for answers, came back with more questions than ever. I'd spent half my day consoling Uncle Ahmad's family, and the other half consoling myself over men who came just to leave again, who greeted me just to say goodbye, and who couldn't seem to talk to me without introducing death as a third party to our conversations.