Authors: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Montecore (2 page)
“Don’t worry, you are at home here.”
In the book, this scene must be filled with great dramatic gunpowder and symphonic bass tubas.
Write:
“So here they are. My father and Kadir. The hero and his escort. Kadir, who will follow my father’s fate forever, kind of like how Robin follows Batman or the Negro in
Lethal Weapon
follows Mel Gibson. They are two newly found best friends who will never break each other’s promises.”
[Maybe you can then form two soaring birds out in the dawning sky who meet and smile their beaks at each other and then sail away toward Kroumirie Mountain. (That would be like a symbol of our initiated friendship.)]
Your father and I quickly knotted our band of friendship into
a beautiful, wordless rosette. Already on the first day we parked our bodies on the same double bench when Faizal performed lessons. At lunch I showed how one hid one’s sweets under one’s shirt so as not to attract the older boys’ jealousy. During siesta I uttered many questions about his origin, which he tried to answer, but … his tongue still did not work. He waved his arms. He exposed me to a black-and-white photo depicting a suited man being suppered with two Europeans. He let me hold a gnarled chestnut. But not one word was pronounced by his lips. For that reason he was soon nicknamed ironically with the Arabic equivalent of “the one who talks as much as one who has swallowed a radio.”
Your father’s muteness grew Cherifa’s sympathy. He became her new favorite and he assisted her often with domestic assignments. She tried to cure his muteness by constantly conversing him. She discussed heaven and earth, weather and wind, village rumors and relations, scandalous pepper prices, and erotic neighbor visits.
Jealous of the active attention that your father got from Cherifa, Faizal began to plow his palms with hard, punishing blows of the cane. He anticipated moans from your father, but all that happened was that your father’s palms reddened, bled, and were scarred into stable scabs. Your father’s muteness was intact. (Incidentally, isn’t it bizarre that your father’s speech problem was later inheritaged by you? For you must remember what problems you had expressing simple letters like
r
and
s
in your childhood?)
Let the date now leave the spring for the fall before the next winter. Let the frost enshroud the yard, let the crickets become silent. Your father and I played wordless games, partook sunflower seeds, spied on the water-fetching girls of the district. We developed an advanced sign language that only we understood.
Your father’s nights were still perspiring wakes, memories of a mother’s screams, sparks and fiery roars and nightly crossed borders.
Frequently the tears welled his eyes with mental pictures that always bore the character of indistinctness. I tried to comfort his tears but only certain sorrows are comfortable. Others are not. This is the tragic fact of life.
Here I propose that you inject some of your own memories from your yearly vacations in Tunisia. If you fear needing to compete with my metaphoric magnificence you can vary your font. Do you memorize anything from Jendouba?
Sure you remember Jendouba …
The city in western Tunisia where Dads grew up. The city where wrinkly, straw-hatted farmers sit crookedly on horseback and red trailers rattle iron bars. You remember the hectic souk, hajjis who bite together their white veils with their teeth, the movie theater where they showed Chinese kung fu films with German subtitles.
You remember the pounding at the hamam, the eternal rubbing out of sweat dirt, Dads’s hairy bodies, and then go home on the truck bed with cactuses whizzing by and stacked mountains of garlic.
But your strongest memory is Grandma Cherifa, who was so fat she always went sideways through the doors. Cherifa, who welcomed you with a pat and called you
felouse
and always pinched your spare tire to check your subcutaneous fat and always scolded Dads because you were practically starved to death from all the strange Swedish food. And you remember Grandpa Faizal, the retired village teacher with a doctor’s bag who always defended Jendouba and maintained that the city actually has a lot in common with New York. Both cities are quite near rivers, for example. Both cities
are run by idiots. Both cities have yellow taxis. Both cities have big garbage problems. And both cities are hard to get lost in—New York has its grid system and we have our brilliant alphabet system—and then Faizal smiles so his white mustache becomes an extra smile on top, because he certainly doesn’t need to explain whose cousin it was that thought up Jendouba’s street system …
And both cities have also earned a long list of nicknames. New York has “the Big Apple,” “the Melting Pot,” “the World’s Capital,” “the City That Never Sleeps.” Jendouba has “the Asshole,” “the Armpit,” “the Sauna,” “the Colon,” “the Donkey’s Ass,” “the Grill,” “the Fireplace,” “the Oven,” or maybe Dads’s ironic “the Freezer.” And it’s only when Dads want to be a little extra academic that he says that you will be spending the summer in “Anus Rectum.”
And you remember all of Dads’s friends. The journeys home from the airport in Omar’s 1960s Mercedes with taped hubcaps, the welcome-home couscous with Olfa’s family, Amine’s roaring greetings, Zmorda’s warm lap. Everyone’s sighs when Nader starts to brag, as usual, about that tailor who believe it or not sews pants with legs of different lengths at no extra cost. And you remember so incredibly much more, the tattoos on Sofiane’s gigantic biceps, Dhib’s left arm that’s always extra brown from all the sunny hours in the taxi, the nights sleeping on the roof, and the smell of just-washed sheets, hookahs with apple flavoring, and just-baked cookies from Emir’s factory. Twilight on the medians of the downtown streets, where you sit with Grandma and break off pieces of watermelon with a splitting sound, spitting seeds at passing
cars, waving at Dhib’s taxi, enticing him with the pulp while the light pink watermelon juice runs slowly down your forearm. But the question is, does any of this belong in the book about your father? Presumably not. Presumably it’s better to let Kadir steer in the beginning … because of course you remember Kadir, too. Dads’s best friend. The woman-hungry compliment sprinkler in a violet suit who visited your family in Sweden in the middle of the eighties and left in a fury for reasons you don’t remember. What was it that really happened?
In the next scene it’s the winter of 1964. The peaks of Kroumirie Mountain glitter snow and your father has lived at Cherifa’s house for two years. Two years of total muteness. Two years without the tiniest whisper.
On that wintry day everyone sat shivering in the dining hall; we intook our food and blew warm air in our hands. I remember how your father suddenly levitated and marched toward Cherifa’s kitchen, even though this was very illegal. I saw from a distance how he hacked his fourteen-year-old throat, unstuck his tongue, and … spoke!
“Um … may I have seconds, please? I am not full.”
His voice was perfectly normal, with the exception of a very wide hoarseness. Cherifa’s mouth circled itself and flapped up and down like a disbeliefed fish.
“Excuse me. May I have a little more food?” your father repeated, with his voice’s volume turned up even more.
“If you do not give me seconds I might relate certain rumors … No one hears more stories than the one people think are mute, if you understand what I mean. You probably do not want Faizal to find out about …”
At this point your father’s voice was reduced to an inaudible whisper. Cherifa’s confusion was so great that she actually (for the first time in the history of the world) granted a foodwise refill. After that day, your father was even more favorited by Cherifa (and even more despised by Faizal).
Why did your father’s tonguely effectiveness suddenly return? No idea. Sometimes life persists in not following those patterns that are bookishly adequate. In the book we will do our best to formulate an obvious motive for your father’s cured tongue in order to avoid confusing the reader. What do you say we have your father march into a forest, pass under a chestnut tree, take a chestnut to the head, and then cry, “
OW!
” Then you can have him say: “Oh, a chestnut, how symbolic that this should cure my muteness.” Or you could have him be afflicted by a magical dream sequence in which his future is depicted in a modern Joyce-esque stream of consciousness: “Ow-ow-there-I-am-going-to-have-to-court-a-Swedish-stewardess-and-there-I-am-going-to-dine-with-Jurgen-Habermas-and-there-I-will-give-an-acceptance-speech-for-a-photography-prize-at-the-Canadian-embassy-in-Egypt! I-should-probably-force-my-tongue-to-be-cured!” Choose the direction of the path yourself.
With the gift of speech, your father’s and my friendship grew to an unshakeable foundation. I never asked about his motive for muteness; instead I wanted to know everything about his parents and his history. And your father shaped it for me with a voice that was his and words that suddenly came flooding out like the blood from the elevator in
The Shining
. He spoke about his father, Moussa, and described him as a wealthy Algerian who lived his life in international airspace and wore sumptuous silk pajamas at night.
“My father, oh, my father!” he cried, until he had attracted everyone’s attention (except for half-deaf Amine’s). With our ears listening eagerly, he told about his father’s career as a chemical water
purifier. Soon your grandfather’s picture was mirrored throughout the whole world and he had sufficient finances to invest in frequent candy factories and jukebox stores.
“Then he met my mother at a symphonic concert in Monaco. She is one of the world’s most beautiful models, born with Algerian parents in Miami Beach in America. Now she’s an actress and good friends with Grace Kelly and Humphrey Bogart. By the way, have you seen this?”
With his pride shining, your father presented the worn photograph he always carried with him. He said that the man who sat, black-suited, at the table in fine European company was his father, Moussa. On his right side sat the celebrated film star Paul Newman, and on his left was the water-waved rock singer Elvis.
“And by the way …,” he added after having examined the photo in detail. “Do not be upset by the nose-investigating bodyguard in the background.”
We were all very impressed by your father’s stories. Our eyes shone in stereo when we cried, “Tell more! More!”
The consequence was an expanded stimulus of the buzzing dragon we call imagination. Your father continued:
“My father, Moussa, also has frequent golds in the world weight-lifting championships and has worked as a tamer of tigers. He has four Pontiac V8s; two black, the rest red. Now he lives in a luxurious district of Paris where the lawn mowers look like small cars and weekends are spent on golf or at the racetrack. All colors of women swim his swimming pool topless and oil their shoulders with costly coconut-smelling cream. Why was I relocated here? After my mother’s unlucky death in a car accident, my father’s intention to teach me the hard school of poverty grew. But soon … anytime, maybe tomorrow or next week, his body will arrive to fetch me to the abundance of freedom in France. In the harmony of commonality we will afflict cinemas and meet film stars and practice windsurfing and test
his large collection of luxury cruisers. If you want you can come along …”
I observed your father and asked (with a certain newly wakened suspiciousness):
“And how has he arrived at this success?”
Your father folded the picture carefully, returned it to his pocket, and said:
“My father is a triplicate of talent: water purifier, Casanova, and cosmopolitan!”
Why did his tongue cultivate such a great many glissades of truth? I don’t know. However, we can see two interesting tendencies:
1. Everything in your father’s life that had political blackness was filtered out. Politics were, for him, a swamp that had already drowned too many in his vicinity. Not until late in life would your father change his relationship with politics. Perhaps too late.
2. Certainly we all realized that your father’s words were not totally correct. But still we were hypnotized and stimulated. Is it not bizarre how the words of imagination can rumble forth a certain comfort? And is that not reality’s reason for the existence of superfluousities like horoscopes, psychologists, and authors?
Before I terminate this collection of data about your father’s childhood, I want to detail something important: If you are still hesitating about the geniality of this project, I want to emphasize that
NO
economy is vital for my assistance. Do not let your Swedish stinginess limit our book’s future! All I ask in exchange for corresponding you my collected data about your father is that our book’s honesty should be maximally spiced. This guarantee is vital to me, because false rumors swarm your father’s life.
THE TRUTH
and nothing
but
THE TRUTH
must be our lighthouse in the shaping of a literary master opus. Can this promise be cast me in steel? In that case I promise to correspond you the reality of truth about your father’s background. It will shock and horrify, not to mention stimulate and erect, both you and our future readers.
Dearest greetings!
Thank your effectively delivered answer! To read your positive response to my bookly idea warmed my humor (despite your sloppy grammar and the lack of capital letters after periods). Is “wzup dawg” a frequently used greeting in today’s Sweden? In any case, I am extremely happy about our found relationship. To be messaged by you feels almost like being messaged by your father, and this anesthetizes the anxiety that constantly pounds my soul. You still have not obtained any sign of life from him? Last night I dreamed that he had been put to death by a stray machete in a Brazilian smack town. I awoke bathing in perspiration and I devoutly hope that the dream was only a dream …
I present great understanding that you “can’t guarantee anything” and that at the moment you are “sooooo not pumped” (sic!) about thinking about the writing of book number two. That is exactly why it is fortunate that I can assist you. More difficult to understand is your volcanic hate toward your publishing house. Why so angry that Norstedts presented your novel as “the first novel written in authentic Rinkeby Swedish?” Isn’t that probably just their method for increasing interest before reviews? Terminate immediately your naming of them as “Whorestedts.” And no, “bourgeois Swedelow idiots” is not an adequate name, either. Return your youthful rage to the deposit box that we call self-control! Is this the avalanchesque wrath that your poor father was subjected to during your adolescence? It cannot have been mild to be your father.
