My beautiful friend Joëlle, whose voice when she sings breathes into language a density, a substance—my beautiful friend Joëlle recommends that I read a translation of Le Dibouk (The Dybbuk) by An-ski.
I teach Molière’s Dom Juan (Don Juan). The final scenes, in Daniel Mesguich’s stagings, seemed to her to answer one another.
So I go toward Le Dibouk. It speaks to me. I remember too the posthumous element in my doctoral work on the different voices in Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves. But the resonance reaches far beyond a text, beyond this text, within me. It calls to mind another narrative.
I reread the two books side by side. I pass from one play to the other, from one place to another, from a wandering voice, telling of its emotion in the words of the Song of Songs, to the unheard-of yet equally strange extravagance of Don Juan.
So I take my courage in both hands. Never have I balked so much before speech. I am afraid.
In my family they tell the story of my grandfathers. They tell how the two of them met at the front in the war of 1914–18. I think back to Don Juan’s profession of faith: “I believe that two and two make four, Sganarelle, and that four and four make eight…” A lesson in tolerance and diversity here borne by the verb to be. An arborescence of singularities addable to infinity. Likewise, then: one and one are, would be two; a paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather are two; they “are” two. One must not believe that out of friendship, that in the face of danger, they could have become one. A perfect illusion. How far one is from arithmetic… They tell how, to escape it—death—my paternal grandfather had to play dead among the dead. A dead man and a living man are two: one had to hold to that. My grandfather’s life depended on it. (Despite this, something perhaps had been contracted.)
At the end of that war the two companions—the two young men—promised each other that if they had children they would do everything to unite them.
I do not know how the one met his wife. I do not know how the other chose his.
Then come my parents.
“The Rabbi Chimchon: Sender, son of Hénia, the pure dead man (???) Nissan, son of Rivké, declares that in the time of your youth, when you were both pupils at the same yeshiva, you exchanged, as a sign of friendship, the oath to marry your children to one another when you had any.” Le Dibouk, p. 58.
It was thus that there was an “oath.” A word is sealed. It bears the seal of friendship and of a past. Within it, lives are going to flow. Afterward, reality arranges itself so that the word exchanged is carried out, entirely carried out, totally, without the shadow of a doubt, of a contestation, of a hesitation, of a wavering.
The son that I am would find something to object to. To object—redire—to tell again what they never ceased to sing into his ear, into his soul, into his child’s virginity, so as to question it.
My father, a child of the troops, struck up a friendship with another child of those troops that France kept in its bosom as a reserve for the wars to come: Indochina…, Algeria. Of those two, nothing is said. Only the first names come back to me: Zidane and Abderahmane.
My father’s first name resonates for me outside of meaning. That of his friend calls for a translation: Abd—creature, but in the sense of a creature submitted, like a slave, to its creator… erahmane—merciful.
One day…: that is how what was told to me continues. One day my father presented himself on the threshold of the house where my mother lived. He had come to see his friend. My mother says that she opened the little fanlight of the front door. She says that she saw my father, that she was dazzled by him, that she believed he had green eyes.
My father’s brown eyes would have sufficed. Photographs of him show an impressive, undeniable beauty, inherited from his father. The framing of my father’s face (dazzling my mother, certainly) sets down, marks off to begin with, the space and the time of an error: an illusion.
I have since learned to know the infatuation of the women of the Maghreb for “green eyes.” Green, in the lands of Islam, is nonetheless no rarity. It floods the mosques, the objects of worship, the paradise described in The Book itself… Ah! yes, but green eyes! those promised that paradise there, paradise, love sheltered from the torment…
In the Song of Songs—the one that Hanan, the predestined fiancé in Le Dibouk, sings “with emotion”—never are the objects of love on the fiancée’s body captured by an immediate predicate. Everything is an object of comparison and of metaphor. Everything is poeticized to the extreme. I think back to a sentence of Barthes: “To write is to shake the meaning of the world, to set within it an indirect interrogation, to which the writer, by a final suspension, refrains from answering.” To love too?
My intention is not to break, my intention is not to criticize. The Don-Juanesque utterance returns to me once more, “two and two make four”—a Kabbalist’s preoccupation, Hanan’s activity in Le Dibouk… One and one were not two. They were three. An image, a cliché, a veil, a shadow (of green) added itself. The narrative, my mother’s “I believed” (that he had green eyes), unveils nothing of a first disappointment. It claims to take it as a joke. And I am not superstitious.
My father asked my grandfather to go and make a “khotba.” The word, in Arabic, comes from the root kh-t-b. Literally it is far closer to “to question,” “to make a speech,” than to the request. My grandfather, my peaceable grandfather, a farmer by trade, with immense service records, went to “question” my mother’s parents. This questioning carried all the more weight in that it was preceded and intimately predestined by an oath, the oath of my two brave grandfathers to marry their children when they had any. They had them. And the meeting had come about as if by a miracle.
My mother was not the eldest daughter. My grandmother whispered offstage to my grandfather to propose first the eldest, who still could not manage to find a husband. But the one who came for a khotba did not yield on his child’s desire. He said: “My son spoke to me of Fatima; it is for Fatima that I have come.”
In this episode too the shadow of another, of a three, wished to insinuate itself, to mingle, to take the place, with no regard for the word given or promised, with no regard for an antecedence.
After the narrative, another material came to haunt my gaze. It continues to do so. It is photography. There are a multitude of photos taken around the engagement and the wedding of my parents. The period is that of what was then called the “events” of the Algerian war. These photos, materially, I no longer want to see again. I resolve my memory only to revisit them. They are of an anachronism, an exuberance, that are unimaginable. What does one see? What was happening that one does not see?
My father, a young officer of the French army, was of village origin. My mother had grown up in the town, where her grandmother, my great-grandmother, resided. Her aunts did not want to keep her so that she might continue her studies at the lycée. She was thus educated and made francophone by means and acquaintances of which I know nothing. Photography in this domain gives me nothing. Only a few shots show her with her brothers. She has long braids.
Wicked tongues say that my father married her only for that long hair. My father’s discretion is great, however. He never said anything of his emotion. He shows only a great deal of liveliness at the moments of the wedding anniversaries. In the photographs, this marriage is idealized and sublimated in the costumes and the dresses, in the poses and the iconography. My parents, in the midst of the Algerian war, were among the first to have a white wedding, but above all they were among the rare ones to wed the white to the military dress that my father wore at the time. The photos show the candid gathering of civilians and military men, Arabs and French, of women in white organza. My father very courteously supports my mother’s gloved hand. They are on the threshold, on a front step. Does love lead to such “naturalness,” to such ease in the ritual?
The scandal seems to me twofold: to advance serenely as in a Botticellian procession despite “events” not very far off, very close… and to affirm, in the face of the French authority, the right to happiness of the little officer it had raised since he was small.
The rupture with tradition, the pomp of white and tulle without a church, is the work of my aunt—the one through whom a usurpation is said to have come about; it is the work of a seamstress, gifted, inspired, an artist. She did not marry my father; she made the dresses, organized the banquet, rented the hall…
The engagement dress with its thousand flounces of organza is hers. My mother seated on a bed in the middle of her corolla, a reflection of her bare back in the mirror… The profile and the abandon are remarkable. There is no question here of criticizing. The molding of the fiancée in the flower of her innocence or of her virginity is under way.
What does my father do during this preparatory period? What simplicity, what hope on the part of his father and his mother is aroused by the marriage of their eldest son? The grandfathers who had taken a liking to each other on a terrible front and who had pledged each other their children to come are, at this moment, without bonds, without discussion.
The photographs of my mother in the house of her parents-in-law show that the grafting of the Western onto the village simplicity of a family come from a hamlet of huts, of gourbis, is taking hold. There is no rejection. It is thus that many of the colonized will marry.
I could say now that the story, that the “telling” and that the photographs stopped there. I could hold to this version. It is said by the messenger in Michel Waszynski’s film adapting An-ski’s text: “One does not pledge one’s word on what does not yet exist.” That, I am persuaded, was the wrong of my grandparents. The messenger, in this film—one could specify, in the image—is a being of in-visibility. Appearing and disappearing at the whim of his words, of his messages. I am quite afraid of having been, of being, this messenger.
My task would be to disappear as I began and to reserve the rest of this story, my story, the story of my misfortune, for a text that I would destroy.
Just to say that the pledging of the word on what did not yet exist gripped me—I, who exist—to this word, to its inaugural character; that this gripped me to every word said and given…