Montecore (3 page)

To read now, eight years later, how you describe him as a “damn unforgiveable betrayer” makes me more than sorrowful. Fathers and sons must share their time, not separate it! I have great understanding for the magnitude of your conflict. But will your relationship never be renovated? Your father is still your father; he may have constructed occasional mistakes in life. But who hasn’t? Unfortunately, I recognize the character of your father’s pride—it makes
certain things impossible (and to contact a son with an apology is one of those things).

You wonder suspiciously what I will get out of helping you (“like what’s in it for you”). Let me respond by describing my usual day: I authorize a small hotel in Tabarka. I am fifty-four years old. I have a saved economy that will securitize my pension. I have no family. I do, on the other hand, have a passport that is not welcomed without a visa in particularly many tempting countries. Thus my workday follows the patterns of tradition: I awake, I place my body at the reception desk, I take keys, I direct some tourists to viewpoints, I point the cleaning lady to newly left rooms. But mostly I sit still and surf the global world net. I download humorous Japanese commercials, read about J-Lo and Paris Hilton in American sensation journals, watch
The Worst of Jerry Springer
, localize gratuitous facts. (Incidentally, do you know the global record in banana eating? Only twenty-three.) So I have great quantities of superfluous time, which I will gladly sacrify in order to reafflict the sphere of Swedish and correspond you your father’s history. I owe him that. At least.

Your directive about the book’s need for “a super-obvious dramatic curve” has influenced me in the preparation of the attached document. I propose that the chestnut theme can be the common thread with which the episodes in your father’s life are woven together. I also agree that certain people’s need for anonymity could be damaged if we employ their real names. So let us call the book “fiction” and modify certain names. What shall we name your father? In order to prophesy his future relocation to Sweden, I propose the symbolic name “Abbas.” Then we can write: “Thus my father’s name bore similarity to the Swedish pop group that would heap the dance floors of the seventies with hits like ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Bang-a-Boomerang.’ Was this a coincidence, or a sign of fate? We’ll tend toward that later …” We could also call him Hammah. Or Bilal. Or maybe Robert, after his idols Robert Frank and Robert Capa?

Attached you will find the truth about your father. Do not be shocked by the surprise.

Your stable friend,

Kadir

PS:
I radiate you positive thoughts and intersect my fingers in anticipation of the coming day of publication. Good luck!

PS2:
I assume that we will continuize our relationship in Swedish? Your naïvely crooked Arabic is probably not serviceable to us in the forming of a book …?

During the spring of 1965, your father’s nightly wakings continued. The difference was that he could now scream both himself and the rest of us to awakeness. Some nights I spied on his body where it lay wet from perspiration with wide-open eyes. When dawn approached, he located himself by the window and gazed out over the yard. One night I padded my steps toward your father where he sat curled up in the window with his shoulders vibrating up and down. His crying sounds had a low volume and in his hand he cradled his beloved chestnut.

“How is your health feeling, honestly?” I whispered with a brother’s caring. Abbas quickly dried his tears and tried to return to normalcy.

“Very well. Thank you for asking.”

“But then why are you pursued by such repeated nightmares?”

Your father looked down at his chestnut and said:

“Can you guard a secret that you may not describe to anyone?”

“I promise.”

“On all your existing honor for all time?”

“I promise.”

“I have not been entirely honest about my history …”

“How so?” (And I must admit that here I felt that type of pleasure that can be stirred when suspicions are verified.) “Isn’t it your father in that photograph?”

“Yes, it’s him. And he is Algerian. But … he doesn’t share his company with Elvis and Paul Newman. Do you know who is sitting beside him?”

“No.”

“It is Maurice Challe and Paul Delouvrier.”

“Wow!”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Uh … no. Who are they?”

Your father explained that Challe and Delouvrier were the two French governors who were responsible for the Algerian colony before the liberation.

“Do you want to know why my father is sitting in their company? Because he was a
harki
. A
béni-oui-oui
. A collaborator. Imagine what Cherifa would do if she knew … Or Sofiane …”

During the following hours, your father whispered his entire true story for my ears. He said that he had been born in an Algerian mountain village near the Tunisian border. His mother’s name (your real grandmother!) bore the name Haifa. She was a powerfully strong woman who grappled with her context like the wrestler and actor Hulk Hogan. Haifa’s ideal was never that of tradition or religion. Haifa had Western habits and spiced her exclamations with French phrases, and this increased the village’s irritation. But Haifa did not let herself be quieted.

One day she proclaimed proudly for Abbas that the name of the man who had signed her pregnancy was Moussa. They had rencountered by chance when she visitized Alger. Moussa had promised her a mutual future with matrimony and a sumptuous life. After their erotic rendezvous, Haifa returned to her home village with rainbow-colored dreams of the future. Unfortunately, it turned out that Moussa’s words were promises of that special character we call lies. Haifa was isolated by her family, and the only person in the village who did not refuse her company was a young, povertous neighbor farmer by the name of Rachid.

Simultaneously, Moussa’s exterior began to be recognized as the Algerian who preferred the politics of the Frenchmen. Moussa eagerly defended France’s civilization task and denied its label as a torture-cultivating occupying power. He rented his tongue to the Frenchmen and in this way padded his wallet.

I interrupted Abbas’s story:

“Have you ever met your father?”

“Yes. One time he afflicted our village. But my age was reduced and I do not remember much of that day. I believe we ate at a restaurant. I remember that he had a substantial gray beard on his chest. I remember that two lifeguards escorted his steps.
And I remember that he delegated me this chestnut. That’s about it.”

“Why a chestnut?”

“Because … no idea. I wish my memory presented a greater clarity.”

It was mostly your grandmother’s stories about Moussa that influenced your father’s soul. The insight that he had a father with an international reputation lifted him to a rocketesque pride (rather than shame). Your father was heaped with a cosmopolitan euphoria, which maximized his emotion of not being like everyone else. Many in the village skirmished and demonstrated, they formed their tongues into discussions about the horridness of the Frenchmen and voiced demands for freedom from colonialism. But your father visualized everything political as a virus. He promised himself as a child that he would
NEVER
anoint his wings in the spilled oil of politics. Instead he fantasized dreams of the international world.

(A whisper from the parentheses: Can you relate to the emotion of never partaking in the generality of your surroundings? In that case, cultivate this emotion in your writing! To form something that is totally separate from your experience is an impracticable task, a little like not laughing when you observe Kramer’s alert hairstyle in
Seinfeld
.)

Your father continued his story with the turbulent years that terminated the fifties in Algeria. It was political chaos; demonstrations bled the streets and terror shook people’s daily lives. In your father’s village, people’s irritation was reflected against the Frenchmen until it involved your father and grandmother. But Haifa refused to conform; she continued to salute the Frenchmen, she sprinkled her language with French phrases and proudly auctioned that her genetics were certainly more global than Algerian and more cosmopolitan than Arabic.

In 1962, when your father’s age was that of a twelve-year-old,
the Évian agreements were terminated. The Frenchmen promised to leave power. The liberation was a fact of Algeria. The consequence was a chaos that we can call typically Arabic. The blood of the power struggle. More protests. More terror. Fifteen thousand dead in FLN attacks in the summer of ’62. Up until Ben Bella took power, initiated his one-party state, and unlawfulized all parties except the FLN. (Write me … without becoming unnerved and without retarding us to the disrupting discussions you had with your father: What people is more creaky at democracy than Arabs? That you don’t concur with your father about this is to me a mystery.)

Many French collaborators, or
béni-oui-ouis
, were forgiven and forgotten to the success of continued bureaucratic careers. Only a few were painted in the colors of shame by the magazines. One of them was your grandfather Moussa. His body had apparently fled the country and now he was depicted in articles and caricatures as a France-controlled dog. The consequence of this campaign? In typical Arab manner, the people let themselves be led like dumb sheep. They began to protest outside your grandmother’s house. They insulted your grandmother; nightly cries echoed the district’s street. Once, her door was colored with malodorous substances which do not deserve descriptions.

Simultaneously, Haifa began to worry about your father’s mental stability. He carried out expeditions in his sleep, he fantasized forth shadow friends, which he conversed. Once he even clad himself with your grandmother’s veils and tried to mask himself as a woman. The only person who afflicted Haifa with support during this problematic period was Rachid, the povertous neighbor farmer.

Unfortunately, Rachid was absent the night that someone invisible smuggled himself into Haifa’s kitchen, punctured the gas pipe, and lit a cigarette in anticipation of the sedating mass of the hissing. The invisible one transported the cigarette into the house and disappeared without a trace in the shadows of the night,
accompanied by the petals of the roar-proliferating fire. The one who, at the last minute, saved your father from the explosion fires was the newly wakened neighbor … Rachid.

“And it was Rachid who transported you here to Jendouba?”

“Yes, I think so. But I actually do not remember,” whispered your father with that sort of dry tone that one gets at dawn when one has been speaking solitarily for several hours. “I remember that I vomited. And I remember that you welcomed me out there in the hall. In between, most of it is blurry and vague. All I have from my home is this photograph and this chestnut …”

The roosters hacked their singing voices in the neighboring yards and my eyes had begun to itch and be sanded by tiredness. Still I didn’t want to sleep. Not yet. I said:

“Strangely enough, our respective histories have certain things in common. My family, too, was erased in an explosive fire as consequence of the colonial time …”

“Mm …”

“Hey, are you listening?”

“Mm.”

But in reality your father sat as though bewitched by the photograph. I wanted neither to distract him nor to leave him. So I waited. What woke his stupor in the end was a pompous passing of gas from Omar’s mattress. We smiled our lips at each other and I said:

“Hey … let us try to catch some sleep before the dawn becomes day.”

I remember the details of the photograph very well. It was granulated and mottled gray, waveringly cut out from an Algerian magazine. The tooth of time had crimped its edges, yellowed its color, and crumbled its corners. Moussa sat, white-smiled and black-suited with visible finger rings, with a thin-mustached Challe on one side and a stiffly water-waved Delouvrier on the other. The photo was actually rather ordinary. Except for the detail that I found
comical but that frustrated your father: the background contours of the anonymous lifeguard who was carefully taking inventory of the interior of his nose. His entire index finger was hidden in the black hole, and this, according to your father, threatened the excellence of the picture. “How can such a small defect have such a large consequence?” he would often interpellate, without anticipating a response. Has your father exposed this photo for you? Perhaps we can localize it and inject it into the book? Or else you can inject your memories of the photo below, in a varied font.

What explication has your father delegated you for his growing up in Cherifa’s home? Perhaps he has not even told you that he was actually born in Algeria? Perhaps you are just now reading these words in a shocked emotion that Cherifa is not your real grandmother? If this is the case I want to remind you of something vital: Whatever version your father has selected, I am the one who forms the reality of truth for you. Memorize that your father always had the truth as an ideal. But sometimes the complications of truth have forced him into lies. Okey-dokey?