Zabor, or the Psalms Read online

  ALSO BY KAMEL DAOUD

  The Meursault Investigation

  Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010–2016

  Copyright © Éditions Barzakh, Alger, 2017

  Copyright © Actes Sud, 2017

  Originally published in French as Zabor ou Les psaumes in 2017 by Éditions Barzakh in Algeria and by Actes Sud in France.

  Published by arrangement with Actes Sud and 2 Seas Literary Agency.

  Translation copyright © Emma Ramadan, 2021

  Excerpt on this page from The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, 1808.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Daoud, Kamel, author. | Ramadan, Emma, translator.

  Title: Zabor, or the psalms : a novel / Kamel Daoud; translated from the French by Emma Ramadan.

  Other titles: Zabor ou les psaumes. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020030700 (print) | LCCN 2020030701 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635420142 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781635420159 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ3989.3.D365 Z2313 2021 (print) | LCC PQ3989.3.D365 (ebook) |

  DDC 843/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030700

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030701

  Ebook ISBN 9781635420159

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kamel Daoud

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: The Body

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two: Language

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Three: Ecstasy

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  TO MY FATHER

  Hamidou

  WHO BEQUEATHED HIS ALPHABET TO ME

  HE DIED WITH SUCH DIGNITY,

  THAT HE CONQUERED HIS DEATH.

  You write what you see and what you hear with tiny letters squeezed together, squeezed together like ants, which go from your heart to your honorable right side.

  The Arabs, they have letters that lie down, get on their knees and rise up completely straight, like spears: it’s a writing that coils and unfurls like the mirage, which is clever as time and proud as combat.

  And their writing travels from their honorable right side to their left, because everything ends there: at the heart.

  Our own writing, in the Ahaggar, is a writing of nomads, because it is all made up of dashes which are the legs of all the herds. Legs of men, legs of meharis, of zebus, of gazelles, everything that traverses the desert.

  And then the crosses determine whether you go to the right or to the left, and the periods, you see, there are a lot of periods. They are the stars that steer us through the night, because we, the Saharans, we don’t know the way, the way that is guided, in turns, by the sun and then the stars.

  And we set out from our heart, and we make bigger and bigger circles around it, to enlace the other hearts in a circle of life, like the horizon around your herd and around yourself.

  DASSINE OULT YEMMA,

  Tuareg musician and poet, early twentieth century

  1

  (Outside, the moon is a howling dog, writhing in pain. The night is at its darkest, imposing large swaths of the unknown onto the small village. Someone violently rattles the latch of the old door and more dogs respond. I don’t know what to do or whether to stop. The old man’s belabored breathing makes it seem as though the walls are closing in, and gloom spreads over the surroundings. I attempt to distract myself by looking around me. On the walls of the bedroom, between the closet and the photo of Mecca, the old chipped paint forms continents, dried-up and perforated seas. Dried-up wadis seen from above. “Noun! By the pen and what they write,” says the Holy Book in my head. But it doesn’t help. The old man has no more body, only a piece of clothing. He will die because he has no more pages to read in the book of his life.)

  Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, medicine, magic, reciting verses on a loop, inactivity, but I think I’m the only one to have found the solution: writing. But that means always writing, nonstop, with hardly any time to eat or relieve myself, to chew fully or scratch my aunt’s back while very loosely translating the dialogue of foreign films that rekindle the memories of lives she’s never lived. Poor woman, she deserves a book of her own that would let her live to be a hundred.

  Strictly speaking, I should never again look up from the page, but stay here, hunched and hard at work, focused on my profound motivations like a martyr, scribbling like an epileptic and moaning about the unruliness of words and their tendency to multiply. A question of life and death, of many deaths, to tell the truth, and of all of life. All, young and old, bound to the speed of my writing, to the screeching of my calligraphy on the page, and to that vital precision I refine by touching on just the right word, the nuance that will save them from the abyss, or the synonym that can po
stpone the end of the world. A form of madness. The many notebooks I must cover in ink. Blank pages, 120 or more, preferably unlined, with a cover, rigid as rock but nimble and with an oily, warm texture so as not to irritate the side of my palm.

  (A small cough. Positive sign. The light returns to the room and the body of the dying man appears less gray. A stream of shimmering saliva trickles from his mouth, disfigured by dentures, and rests on his chin.)

  I bought so many notebooks, calculating how many to buy based on the number of people I knew or had heard about who were already dying from disease, old age, or an accident: two a day, sometimes ten or more; one time, I bought seventy-eight notebooks at once, after attending a neighbor’s opulent wedding (sitting alone on the ground with a horrible plate of meat that I left untouched, indifferent to the wailing music, my body noiseless, ignored by everyone except the groom who wore a ridiculous suit and came by to quickly shake my hand) and staring unabashedly at the many people I had become responsible for, the secret guardian of their longevity. For I was the rower and they the passengers, O my Lord!

  The nearest “bookstore”—what they call, where I’m from, those places that sell cigarettes, envelopes, stamps, notebooks, and newspapers—knew me and never questioned my purchases: in the village of Aboukir (center of the world, situated between my navel and my heart, a few miles from the sea, which is a word that doesn’t need conjugations to be infinite), they called me the butcher’s son, “the one who never stopped reading,” and they knew I’d been scrawling in notebooks like someone possessed since I was a child. My father’s wealth had to have a consequence and it was me, with my long, hunched body, my eyes like lakes and my ridiculous voice, as though destiny were mocking my father’s fortune. The kindest in the village sent me old books found in warehouses, the worn yellowed pages dating back to the time of the colonizers, torn-up magazines, user’s manuals for machines that no longer exist or perhaps never did, and, most importantly, those enthralling novels with no author and no beginning because both had been ripped out (bindings maimed, stories skewed with incoherence, orphans I always collect). This chaos was the cornerstone of my universe, and the rest was recorded in notebooks. I was silent and brilliant in school, in the early years. I had neat, meticulous handwriting that served as the veins under the skin of appearance. It certainly helped to circulate a kind of blood.

  (Now, I’m at the heart of the ritual. Completely absorbed and devoted to the struggle. I believe in it deeply. Without it, what is my life worth in this place and what are these lives around me? The universe is either a mockery or an enigma. What time is it? Voices. A hand set down a cup of coffee. And water. The face of a drowned person coming back to the surface. The mouth fascinates me. The collapse of the chin, as if death accentuated gravity. The old man is nothing more than a head, skinny shoulders over the sheet that hides him. The rest of his body is nothing more than a blanket with tiger stripes subjected to outrageous contortions—”Everything okay?” I don’t respond. The day will soon arrive because the lights curve like sheets of paper in the fire.)

  The truth is that they hoped to do me a favor by anticipating my needs, especially when the rumor of my gift spread, covertly. Some, of course, mocked me discreetly and pitied my family for the implausible defect in our tribe’s tree; I was a knot in the wood. In truth, they didn’t know whether to ignore me or celebrate me. I wrote in a foreign language that healed the dying and preserved the prestige of the former colonizers. Doctors used it for their prescriptions, but so did the men in power, the new masters of the country, and the immortal films. Could it be sacred, descended from on high? No one had an answer, they shook their heads as if faced with an old marble idol or as when they passed near the French cemetery, to the east. The village was not big and its conversations were rarely secret.

  I liked that label, “the one who was reading” or “the one who read.” A definitive formula, getting at the essential, which is to say the Holy Book or Knowledge. They said it with gravity, contrition, they respected the power. In our country, reading was conflated with domination, not the deciphering of the world, it meant at once knowledge, law, and possession. The first word of the Holy Book is “Read!”—but no one asks about the last word, the devil’s exhausted voice whispered to me. One day I had to decipher that enigma: the last word of God, the one he had chosen to initiate his spectacular indifference. The exegeses never mentioned it. We were always hung up on the Last Judgment, not on the final word. I also wondered why the injunction was made to the reader, and not to the writer. Why the first word of the angel wasn’t “Write!” It was a mystery: What is there to read when the book has not yet been written? Are we meant to read a book that’s already before our eyes? Which one? I’m getting sidetracked.

  So I bought the notebooks as I counted again, eyes closed, body calm under the gnarled vine of our courtyard, at the hour of the siesta, all the people I had met the day before in our village, which I mapped like an island. One by one, meticulously, like coins. Arranging them on the shelves in my head with numbers and letters and features and names and their tribe. Without letting myself get distracted by the clouds, or by the season’s gentle heat that was transforming the blood under my skin to sugar, or by the few planes that emphasized the silence of the sky. I liked this exercise, preceded by stretching, lengthening both my body and the entire firmament with my arms. Unfurling the wings of Poll, perched on his coconut trees. Because, at certain inspired hours, I imagined myself in the form of Poll the parrot, responsible for a sumptuous racket in the tropics, a bird with an exceptional, civilizing destiny on an unknown island. I had stolen this name from a book written in the eighteenth century that tells of a shipwreck, an encounter with a supposed cannibal, and the history of solitude. (Memory of summers I spent in a delicious convalescence with my permanently mute grandfather. Rediscovering things, desires, after a series of horrific migraines. A quick glance to gauge the return of life in the pebble of his body. His face still vacant, mouth open, but I glimpsed a tear. He’s not crying. It’s the automatic response of the eye combating dryness. I’ve always loved the word “retina” because it looks like a melting pot, the site of all possible sunrises.)

  But it was slightly painful to always have a number associated with a face. It was difficult for my memory, at the beginning. Sometimes the faces of familiar people flattened new ones or stole features from them, their hair, the shape of their eyes. Rendering the inventory dangerous and my gift a bit myopic. And when I tried to fix a face and immobilize it like a bird in my hands, it would deform maliciously. For nothing is more anonymous than a face we’ve stared at for too long. Even those of the people closest to us. But over the years, I’ve become agile: I’ve replayed the film in my head, scrutinized the details, recited the names to put an end to the scramble and firmly reorganize the genealogies, the filiations and kinships. Like the strict leader of a scattered tribe. Then I invented stories to perpetuate their lives, chosen from a long list of books I would have liked to read at one time or another in my adolescence. This was my method. The only one I had found to overcome the rarity of books in the village, and my boredom, and also to give solemnity to my notebooks. Why did I do it? Because if I forgot someone, they would die the next day. Simple as that.

  I verified it countless times. It’s my mute malediction. The law of my life that no one knows. I’ll say (write) it: When I forget, death remembers. Confusedly, but abruptly. I can’t explain it, but I feel bound to the Reaper, its memory and my own are connected like two vases: when one empties, the other fills. Well, that’s not quite right. Rather: when my memory empties or wavers, death proves firm, recovers its sight like a raptor, it nosedives and depopulates the village before my eyes. A matter of equilibrium but also, perhaps, the enactment of a law I have not fully deciphered. Similarly, when I remember lucidly and use the right words, death is blinded once more and turns back around in the sky, grows distant. Then it kills an animal in the village, attac
ks a tree to the bone, or gathers insects in the surrounding fields, to the east, to munch on while it waits to regain its sight. I love describing death thus disoriented. Confirming both my gift and its usefulness.

  It’s not about magic in the ancient sense of the term, but the discovery of a law, a sort of revived correspondence. Writing was invented to stabilize memory, that’s the premise of my gift: we don’t want to forget because we don’t want to die or see others around us die. Writing came into the world so universally because it was a powerful way to counter death, and not just an accounting tool in Mesopotamia. Writing is the original rebellion, the real fire stolen and shrouded in ink to keep us from burning ourselves.

  What happens when I sleep? Perhaps God keeps watch as a referee in this game. It’s death’s dead time, in a way. All I know is that I have to count the people I meet during the day or at night, buy notebooks according to their number, and then write before I sleep, or at dawn or even the next day, write their stories full of names and follies, or obsessively describe every place in the village—pebbles, rusty iron, roofs…Writing, simply, is in itself a method of healing those around me, a form of preservation. Another detail: between my forgetfulness and the last breath of someone near, I have a grace period of three days; I like to believe in it to maintain my discipline. I can delay writing about a person by three days, never more.