Counter-Sense
A Short Story (Excerpt from a forthcoming novel)
Rolland Doukhan
On the other side of the Atlantic, there is my native city. My city of North Africa, The one where I was born, And everything, With heaps of orange peels, With the deaf and the blind, little hurts at the edge of the weeks,
On the other side of the Atlantic, There is my native city, With smells like crossed noises, And all the streets are dirty, Clothed in derisory games and shards of sun-curses.
(Opening lines of the poem “America,” R.D.)
Daniel Oppenheim
Gabriel sat down on the terrace of this café he knew so well. The square and its two great plane trees seemed to have rooted themselves as much in time as in the soil. This sort of immobility of the little town of Farioule calmed his melancholy, plunging him into a bittersweet serenity. He had remained more than twenty minutes, standing, before the grave of M’ma Ouarda. He had nearly taken out of his pocket the little kippah he had carried with him from Paris. But he had not done it. He had nearly recited, his hand over his eyes, the Shema Israel, as he had said it that day of his mother’s death at the hospital. But he had not done it. He had nearly left the little cemetery without lighting the slightest memorial candle, but that, too, he had not done. He had contrived to find the flame to place at the foot of the stone, and that he had been able to do. Now…
He took out of his briefcase the first of the notebooks in which he kept his Diary. With a certain astonishment, he noticed that he had not put, on the first page, what is ordinarily the specificity of this genre of literature, that is, the date. He reflected for a moment. Let’s see, notebook no. 1, he had begun it… it was… But yes, it was just three days after his mother’s death, so July 24, 1988. Yes, that made ten years already. So he might as well inscribe this date at the very beginning of this Diary, on the first page. An infantile Diary, some would say. What of it? He scrawled the date on the cardboard cover. There, it was done. It was ridiculous, but it was done.
Notebook no. 1. July 24, 1988.
The room was simple and clean. I found it beautiful, too, which may seem astonishing for a place where illness conditions the whole décor. Yes, I found it beautiful, with its walls of so pale a blue and that window so wide that it seemed to be like an invitation for the tree outside, whose branches moved gently in the little breeze of this summer already well underway. At the sight of those green leaves, almost within reach of my hand, I realized with astonishment that my mother’s room must be on the ground floor of the hospital, or, at the very least, on the first floor, which, for a week, had never struck me.
Strangely, among the little notices that indicated the names and ranks of the heads of the ward, the hospital regulations, and other notes habitual to such places, there was a reproduction of a very, very famous painting by Manet, whose name I could not manage to recall. A painting by Manet! What could my mother understand of a painting by Manet? Did she even know the place, the importance, of a painting in the life of a man, of a society?
Two beds. Only one was occupied. By my mother. She was looking at me with that smile of happiness she always had when I arrived at the house after a long absence, or on the evenings of Pessah when we were all gathered together. All present and accounted for.
I forced myself, too, to return my mother’s smile. It was the eighth day of her hospitalization.
“So, Mama, how do you feel today?”
Without answering, my mother continued to look at me. She was full of so intense a happiness that an anguish invaded me because, I knew it well, I was the center and the cause of this happiness. And this responsibility was a very heavy burden for me to bear.
Then, the soft voice let fall:
“My son, when you are here, everything always goes very well. But you know, I would not want…”
She interrupted herself and turned her head toward the window, toward the tree one could glimpse and that moved gently in the breeze. I felt, all at once, freed.
“What would you not want, Mama?”
“No, nothing. In any case, what I would want, now, no longer exists, it no longer has any importance… El rhècha dareth1!”
This way of mixing, without warning, Arabic and French had always been her way of communicating with us. But, since our arrival in France, French was taking on a more important place.
My mother continued to fix her gaze on the window, and her face had that transparency I admired when I was very small, it was… It was a very long time ago. Lord, I said to myself, thinking of the age I was today, when I was little, what does that mean? In any case, it makes nearly forty years. At that time, my conversations with my mother, it is true, were always carried on in that Judeo-Arabic language that was her own language. But for years, especially since our arrival in France, my mother tried to express herself in that laborious French, studded here and there with Arabic expressions that surged up when the emotion was too strong. She would then cast furtive glances around her as if she had feared that one might take offense at her accent or her mistakes. Of course, it was not this way of speaking that made me suffer, but this attitude of guilt into which it plunged her. So much so that, to comfort her in a way, I caught myself speaking in Arabic more often than I had done during my adolescence.
“Mama, do you need anything else? Ouach tchrabi, ya M’ma2?”
I had posed this question in a detached manner, setting down beside her the wool jacket and the little coffee cup she had asked me for the day before. Flowers, she held in horror. “Flowers are for the dead,” she was wont to say, “they’re not for the living!”
“In any case, what I would want, now, no longer exists, it no longer has any importance…” The phrase she had let slip an instant earlier terrified me, I knew not why. I wanted to understand, but at the same time, I sensed that the words she would say were going to hurt me:
“Well then, tell me, Mama, what is it you desire that no longer exists now? And to begin with, it doesn’t mean anything at all, this way of speaking!”
I felt keenly all the absurdity of my behavior. I posed a question and, in the same sentence, I asked her not to answer it. Well, I knew well that I should not have let my anxiety, my irritation show.
My mother kept looking at me without saying anything. I could not get out of my head that she was busy storing up images the way one piles clothes into a suitcase before leaving on a journey. Leaving on a journey! this thought made me shudder. In the corridor, on the other side of the door, a trolley was passing. One could hear vials clinking, a nurse laughing. That, that was the present of that day, everything that was simple, prosaic. My mother turned her eyes again toward the window, toward the tree that moved, toward the spring, outside, toward the rest of the world. Suddenly, as if what she was asking me had only a secondary importance, she said:
“Say, Gabriel, do you have everything you need at home?”
I remained dumbfounded. She was not in the habit of giving me my first name. She always said “my son,” or “my Gaby,” or again “ya guelbi3.” Without waiting for my answer, she went on:
“I mean in YOUR home?”
She had insisted on that possessive as if to differentiate clearly between the home where I had lived with Daniella and the one where I had lived since my departure. The one where I lived alone. And behind that “YOUR,” there was Daniella, of course, well, the absence of Daniella. I knew it. She never pronounced the first name of the woman I loved. Whom she too had loved so much. Quite simply, because she had accepted, from the very first day, the reality of our separation, without for all that understanding it. My mother knew many things even if she gave that impression of naïve innocence proper to little girls. She knew, for example, that one does not leave a Jewish wife as Daniella was, for some passing fling with another woman. There was also the absence of a child, which she could not be unaware was an obsession for Daniella as for myself. And then, there was my work as a writer, which, for M’ma Ouarda, was not a profession. Not to mention this choice of science-fiction literature that had imposed itself on me of its own accord, the incredible success of my first three books, and what had followed from it—television, cinema—all that made of me, in my mother’s eyes, an enigmatic being, if not even a bit mad. And yet, without asking herself too many questions, she had accepted en bloc my way of living. But my brutal departure from my home, that, she could not manage to explain to herself. M’ma Ouarda knew by instinct that a half-public life overturns the other half, the private half, but she took good care not to bring the slightest judgment to bear on me. She was wont to say: with all your complicated ideas, you don’t see what is staring you in the face. She was quite right. My eyes were staring out, blinded. I had left one day, just like that, very early one morning. It was a Saturday, a shabbath of course, as Daniella would implacably say. I could no longer bear the constraints inherent to that day, the words, the gestures that were the prerogative of religion as Daniella lived it. I knew that I had issued from all that hodgepodge, but that I was an other as well. An other who disturbed Daniella, frightened her even. Her religious behavior, in its rigor, had ended by distancing me from what, for me, had never been anything but an endearing folklore. I had left. The dietary customs, the gestures of the feasts, all the music of my earliest childhood, had become as if petrified in an ensemble of prohibitions, of obligations, of conventional ideas that were not to be discussed. Everything that went without saying when it came from my mother, or my father, or my uncle, had become unbearable to me, as the years passed. It was a sort of theater that struck a false note in this twentieth century, especially when I found myself, after the death of my father and that of my uncle, like the only male actor in the play. Little by little, the woman I loved had disappeared behind this stage curtain, become a frontier. Imperceptibly, another man had been born in me. And one morning, I had left.
“You know it well, Mama, I have everything I need. I’m grown up now, I know how to run a household.”
I realized that I had taken several minutes to reassure my mother as to what might be lacking in my home. She looked at me strangely, as if she well wondered why I was talking to her about my home. Then, the unwonted phrase came, incomprehensible, with no apparent connection to what had preceded it, nor to this décor that surrounded us:
“Later, my son, in five years, in ten years, come see me… Find a little time, Ya Guelbi4, even if you are far away…”
I did not understand. I did not want to understand. Had my mother just set me a rendezvous? “Later,” she repeated, “later my son, in five years, in ten years…”
She was looking at me. I told myself that she was holding back from asking me for something she lacked, so much so that I repeated the question I had posed to her an instant earlier:
“Do you need something, Mama?”
“No, no. Or perhaps, yes, just a little coffee. I don’t know if here…”
“But yes, Mama, there is a machine in the corridor. It’s very close. I’ll run, and you’ll drink it in the cup I brought you.”
The machine was broken. I had to go down to the cafeteria on the ground floor. Of course, there were people. I had to wait my turn, then I came back up with my two plastic cups, with measured steps, so as not to spill the coffee, thinking that I would pour one of them into the porcelain cup and that this gesture would be at once ridiculous and endearing.
Having arrived in the vicinity of my mother’s room, I caught an agitation, a panic among the nurses. The one who knew me well, a woman named Véronique, signaled to me from afar, inviting me even to run. I rushed in her footsteps into the room. My mother was watching me arrive with my two cups in my hands. She had a smile, a sketch of a smile full of tenderness. Then her gaze froze, became empty. There are seconds, like that, that one could almost number. The first, the second, the third… Yes, there had indeed been a gaze up to the eighth second, I believe, perhaps up to the ninth. But in the tenth, nothing more. There had been nothing more. Nothing more, either, in the eleventh, nor in the following ones that nonetheless continued to tick away without my mother forever. Apart from my mother, I thought curiously. Nothing more. I had stupidly set my two cups of coffee on the night table. I was out of breath as if I had run for hours. I made as if to sit down, then stood up again.
All that, those gestures, those gazes, the breathing, it was just before the bells pulled, the buttons on which the nurse had begun to press frantically, just before the useless alarms that all of this set off in my life more than in the hospital, before Véronique’s frantic race through the corridors, in search of the doctor, of an intern, of anyone at all with a white coat, capable of interrupting the course of things. Just before all preoccupation became obsolete, and before the words of the “Shema Israel” had risen to my lips without my even realizing it, and as if without my consent.
The nurse Véronique, come back near me in the room, waited respectfully for the prayer I was murmuring to end, taken aback to see me place my right hand over my eyes, then she touched my arm gently:
“I must tell you, Monsieur, that I was alone with her until the last moment. She pronounced words that remain for me a mystery.”
“What, then? What did my mother say?”
“She made a sign to me with her hand, then she smiled at me, and she said: B and A make BA. I then asked her what she meant by that. She turned her head toward the door and she added: The cat is lying down and… It is at that second that you arrived, and it is then that she departed.”
“Thank you, Véronique, thank you. I think I know what she meant to tell you. I must tell you that my mother… that my mother… could neither read nor write.”
Discreetly, the nurse left the room. B and A make BA. I took the still-warm hand of M’ma Ouarda. M’ma Ouarda. And so, Ya M’ma, your road ends in this little town of the south of France.
One day, a very long time ago, you were watching me work on the dining-room table, over there, in Constantine, and you said abruptly:
“My son, is it difficult to learn to read?”
I raised my eyes toward you, stunned not to have thought of this possibility myself. And right away, I lied:
“Why no, Mama, I’m sure that in a month or two, if we both set ourselves to it, I could…”
I was, what, thirteen or fourteen, perhaps… I went to buy a preparatory-course book, full of big letters and naïve pictures. But the book no longer contained the lesson of B and A make BA. It was already the whatsit method, the whole-word one or whatever… Sounds, I think, associated with whole words. There was no alphabet, or almost none, only obvious and idiotic noises. I armed myself with patience, I took all my memories in hand:
“Look, Mama, you see? This, this is a B that is pronounced bee, and this, this is an A that is pronounced A quite simply. If I put the B before the A, one no longer pronounces Bee and A, but one pronounces BA.”
One day, a very long time ago, Mama… I had wanted to, I had tried. But that day, the broad-bean stew was beginning to burn. You ran to turn everything off.
“My son, I think it’s not at my age that…”
Another day, I took up the picture book again. There was a dog seated wisely beside a cat lying down and asleep. The three words had been separated: dog, cat, and lying-down, and the group of letters C and H common to them had been carefully underlined. Opposite, the sound “SH” had been written. I tried again that time, but uncle Robert had arrived at that instant. He had burst out laughing: well now! school at home! Come on, pour me an anisette with an olive instead, or else I’m going to die of thirst on the spot!
I do believe that I never again tried to offer you the world, my mother. I was ashamed. I remained with these questions in my belly like daggers.
Gabriel raised his head. He had reread, in a single stretch, these pages he had written, ten years before, in one of those spiral notebooks that are taller and wider than school notebooks. Yes, it was the day when he had suddenly resolved to set down in black and white all that had founded him, all that had made him, since his first cry. As if a life related in its slightest details and confided to unknown readers could help him better live his own. Incredible presumption! And to begin with, had he had the honesty to set everything down? He took out of his briefcase the other spiral notebooks, considering them with a pensive air. Yes, does one really manage to recount everything? “I still do not know,” he said to himself, “this is an enigma that the author of science-fiction novels that I am cannot yet resolve.”
And now here he was, back from the little cemetery of Farioule where he had paid a strange visit to a gravestone. Here he was, come back to sit beneath these plane trees he had loved so much in the first months of exile, that is, more than thirty-five years before. He felt himself submerged by a bitter guilt. A short while ago, before the grave of M’ma Ouarda, he had not had the courage to comply with the masquerade of the prayer. He had held himself bolt upright for long minutes, thinking only and curiously of that aborted attempt to teach his mother to read. An attempt some thirty years old.
Gabriel put the notebooks back in his briefcase before answering the waiter who was approaching.