17
MOHAMMED WAS AWAKENED in the morning by the sobbing of the shepherd, who must have been thinking that none of us has the right to forsake our parents, to refuse their invitation. In his grief the deaf-mute saw France as a devourer of children and decided that all in all, he was fortunate never to have left the country. He was weeping alone, leaning on Mohammed’s shoulder, and as he wept, he sensed that Mohammed would soon succumb to sorrow. The shepherd looked at the house, which seemed to him like a mountain, a heap of useless stones. He had never seen so grand a dwelling, not even in the city. Marvelling that it was as big as Mohammed’s heart, he left, wiping away his tears.
Mohammed, however, did not move, despite the appeals of his wife, who had rejoined him. He was there, sitting in the old leather armchair bought at the flea market in Marrakech, immobile, eternal, in front of an immense, empty house, surrounded by a desert landscape swept by a cunning wind, immersed in a heavy silence. Late that evening, his wife tried to convince him to come home with her to their old house, but he wouldn’t budge: Mohammed had not given up hope of seeing his children arrive, even in the dark of night. His wife draped over his shoulders a woollen blanket woven by the village women and left a loaf of bread, some olives, and a bottle of water by his chair. Mohammed said nothing; his expression was fixed, his features drawn, his mood unfathomable. His wife thought he would grow tired and come home to the old house in the end.
The air was cool, the night mild, and there was no one on the main road. Mohammed dozed off. He dreamed he saw the black shadow holding the hand of the white shadow — the shadow of the tall and slender reader of the Koran — as the two were dancing around a tomb, and the tomb was his. He saw himself in that hole, buried while he was still breathing: he struggled, trying to free himself from the shroud, but in vain. Earth was tossed onto his face, then great stones that were bound together with concrete. It all happened very quickly. Silence; then his heart stopped.
Mohammed started awake and drank a swallow of water. The night was vast. Dark, and deep. He would have liked to stand up to go pee, but something or someone was holding him back. He didn’t feel like calling for his wife. So he pissed in his pants. Mortified, he tried again to rise but felt nailed to that accursed armchair, which had once belonged to an old French colonial family. A few springs had pierced the leather and were hurting him. His movements were sluggish, his limbs heavy; his respiration grew slow and halting. He felt the weight of the stones and concrete on his shoulders, and remembered that it is at such a moment that God sends two angels to gather in the last words of those who are dying. While he waited for these envoys, Mohammed decided to tell them everything, get it all off his chest, and emphasise the fact that something had murdered him, that his death was unnatural, for someone had pushed him into this hole, kicking him and mocking both him and his house. But the angels did not come.
Mohammed was crushed. Why should he be the only Muslim to be denied the visit of the angels? Unless it was a sign that all this meant nothing, that he’d been tricked, made a fool of. His rigid arms would no longer move. His head, same thing. Again he felt the hot flow of urine along his legs. He could no longer stop peeing; it was like a fountain of lukewarm water, and he wasn’t even ashamed anymore. What point was there in rising to clean himself up, shave, dab on some scent, and clothe himself in white? No one would come. No one would ever remember him.
An abandoned man will begin to smell bad. Mohammed stank, and not just from the night’s urine: he stank everywhere, like rancid butter. His entire body weighed him down, but he finally managed to raise one arm and felt movement return, freeing him from imprisonment in that chair he’d used as a toilet. He called out for his wife, who hurried to help him rise and visit the village barber, then entrusted him to one of his brothers, who went with him to the hammam, where Mohammed washed himself clean of that horrible night, one of those nights to laugh about with the man who will dig your grave. Alone in the dim light, the two men sat without speaking, and Mohammed scrubbed hard at his skin to rid himself of that episode, which had left the taste of ashes in his mouth. When he thought he glimpsed the black shadow passing by, he sought reassurance by calling on God. If I were in France, he thought, I would be in a hospital, where doctors and specialists would confer over my case and give me medicine to help me sleep without nightmares. Perhaps they would even summon my family to my bedside. LaFrance is a wonderful country because it takes good care of its sick. Here you’re better off never setting foot in a hospital; I’m telling you for your own good! Better the hammam than the hospital.
Mohammed left the hammam a new man. No longer impatient or anxious, he made peace with time, giving it free rein, but most of all he kept faith with his obsession. He spent the day at the mosque, renewing old ties with people who had never left the village and thought the world stopped at the end of their dirt road. They prayed like robots, babbling things only God could understand. Mohammed wasn’t surprised and reflected that he too might have wound up like them.
That evening he took up his place in the colonial armchair, which his wife had been careful to clean, and despite the irritating springs he found it comfortable. His wife brought him food and a small transistor on which he could listen to music, but the radio station played the raucous favorites of young people, so he turned it off. He remembered the flute he’d played as a boy tending sheep, and smiled. Those days were long gone. And yet he thought he heard a flute playing somewhere on the other side of the hill. He had given his deaf-mute cousin some money to go buy a pair of binoculars from the man who’d sold him the armchair, and now he settled himself into that chair, placed the binoculars on his lap, and, eager to use them, awaited the slightest noise or movement, even though he couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. He closed his eyes and rested his hands on the binoculars, reassured by their presence.
The moon was full, and he slept fitfully. He had a dream he’d had several times before and knew quite welclass="underline" standing alone and unable to move in the middle of a vast, white space, he catches sight in the distance of shadows that advance toward him without ever reaching him. The weight of a dead donkey on his back traps him in his furious immobility, and this burden on his body, this impression of being hamstrung by an outside force, frightens him to the core. Trying to call for help, Mohammed cannot make a sound. This bad dream is called the “night donkey.” And donkeys are such gentle animals during the day! he thought. Mohammed had lost all memory of the white woman and her oasis. To reach it again, he would have had to cross a dream that opens onto another dream, but his imagination was weakening, and his dreams were turning into simplified sketches of what he was hoping and waiting for, night and day.