Abdelmjid Kettioui withering
“Withering” by Abdelmjid KETTIOUI
“I am superstitious but not the way dearest mother was before she passed away. Mine isn’t at all the kind of superstition where you fear to break a mirror or come across a black cat first thing in the morning. It’s more about things I tell myself. If Mum is taken by one of her epileptic fits and I am the only one present in the house I’d tell myself: “If the door bell doesn’t ring within five minutes, poor Mum will die and I will not see her any more”. Of course such a superstition hinges on no rational basis but is rather a childish game I have so cherished, it has become part of my mental make-up. If I am in my room upstairs doing my homework I’d think to myself: “If Mum doesn’t call me for dinner in less than ten minutes my father will return home cross and batter her as he always does when angry”. Unluckily, I knew I lost when I found Mum and my father joking around together. But it was on my sixteenth birth-day my game turned life-like as I guessed right. On my way home from school a neighbour’s child insulted me and I wanted to hit him hard. But on second thought I decided it better to take the child and tell his father, then I told myself if I had done so I would have met my father on the way. And as usual he wouldn’t listen to me nor expect me to clear things up. He’d act for my father was a “man of action”. He’d beat me rather. And so he did. I rose to the bait nonetheless. And what he did me was lethal. How I’m still alive to tell the tale, I can never tell”.
“How did it all happen, Adam?” I asked.
“Son-of-a-bitch”, spat out a brat as he gave me the finger. With foul saliva drooling over his nostrils and mouth to write bastardy on his contorted face, the brat was lousier than an earthling. This tormented me the most just as it would make you puke on the face of it. Outraged by the bastardization as a teenager would, I dragged the ten years old louse as you would your neighbour’s trespassing dog to have its master apprised of the encroachment. Yet, the materialization of that childish ritual of mine, the superstitious game my mind had secretly empathized in and, which I believe, I can never grow out of, loomed appalling and bleak in the gloom of that night, like the face of a nightmare. I gave my arrow a shot and it hit home. It boomeranged. I was bleeding as profusely as July’s rain showering in a deluge”.
The fluidity of Adam’s outpourings surpassed the dumb’s I saw in The Morgue a couple of days before. It starred a young but prolific writer who went dumb like death for what remained of her life on sighting with her pupils wide open the vengeful, parched flames of vendetta devouring up her library, stuffed with none but the world's rarest chef d'oeuvres like a museum, and igniting her husband and only child like fuel. Only when she lay moribund could she command her tongue, racing death over running her jeremiad through and making known the miscreants. You can figure how flowing she was. Only Adam was outflowing. Whilst Adam, like a lawyer advocating his plaintiff, went on accentuating every syllable he gave breath to, I devoured up his words with an owl’s ear. Truth is I looked like a brilliant student so set on not missing a word welling out of her best liked professor during one of his most ingeniously delivered lectures.
In point of fact, Adam was an English teacher.
After what looked like an interval, I made to push Adam further for I wanted him to let on everything:
“Just go on Adam, I’m listening”.
“No sooner had I reached where I was heading than he emerged out of no where. Hadj Salem, for that was my father’s name, stood gaping at me with as devoid an expression as a cadaver’s. My father’s so baffled me in making clear-cut its rendition I could not get through the façade and see what lurked underneath. As I let go of the sobbing louse my father’s right palm crashed the bones of my cheek so hard my teeth cracked. It was only then that I realized what my father’s look preluded. It was the calm foreshadowing the storm. As monosyllabic as he had always been when gone mad, my father yelled as wild as he could: “Damned bastard”. Only I couldn’t speak word for mad he went. As he dragged me by the ear he slipped off his belt and whipped me till I didn’t feel a thing. I was dead numb. My father landed a blow on my eye. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a thing. All I could see was darkness. It wasn’t the darkness of darkness. It was my own darkness. I was blind. Yet, on and on my father went, for he wouldn’t stop till he saw me still like a cadaver. The knock -out was the last of a succession of blows he gave me over the back of the head. The pain was horrendous. My head was bleeding heavily. I was marble still”.
As Adam vented his story, he looked blue like the eyes of a spleen. His muscles twitched. His left eye didn’t wink. It was gaping at me endlessly and his chopped teeth flared up at me in stark indignation. Not wanting to digress any further, I brought him back to his thread:
“You were taken to the hospital then”.
“Well, I don’t remember being taken to the operating theatre of the town hospital. All I can remember is that I was floating out of my body and as I was drifting higher and higher I was aware of a long tunnel with radiant, heavenly light at the end. As I came through it, my late mother emerged from the enveloping white fog. She greeted me and I was elated and blissful.
“If you’d like to come with me, I’ll show you the way”, proposed my mother.
“Yes, I would with all my heart” I thought but said:
“No, Mum, my father and little sister still need me”.
As I returned back to my body, I felt nauseous and awful. But thank God I survived the trauma. I opened my eyes but nothing distinct came into view excepting a thick mass of light. As I groped for myself I knew I was attached to drips, monitors and tubes, and my head was thickly bandaged. Then, I grew aware of a presence around me. There was an expecting, tense silence surrounding the room. When I opened my eyes again I could half-see the room spring back to life with surgeons and nurses congratulating one another. I was saved.
A day later the head surgeon told me I almost died but they resuscitated me miraculously. My left eye was still in a dressing. It was shut and sticky. Unfortunately, I was blind in my left eye. I wished I had passed away. Since then I have had this glass eye you see fixed instead. You asked me about the most traumatic day in my life and I find that this was it. And even now that tragic memory will not go from my mind. It still haunts me in my dreams even. I dream of a blood-stained monster that smashes my skull with a huge hammer till my brain is knocked out, night in, night out.”
All in all, I was well-positioned to grasp how troubled, upset and world-weary Adam was. The impression that swept over me was like the one you get when you uncover that a student of your novel writing course has already his debut in print, an autobiography of a boy with a heart-rending history whose life comes to a tragic epilogue, so laconically and cleverly constructed as to draw your pathos and applause.
Adam was also a fourth-year student of the English Language and Literature. Creative Writing was the core of his monograph.
“I can’t write nor read. All I can do is think, brood to no avail. I have to write ten short stories for my monograph and read my Shakespeare and six other novels for my novel class interalia. What makes the malaise I’m in the more virulent is that I am a teacher. This means I have to fight on two fronts. In truth, I’m on the brink of perdition but I won’t ask you to brew an elixir for me. All I want is your understanding and countenance, nothing more”.
“I see, I see, Adam”, I said whole-heartedly. “Let me assure you, Adam, that I’m intent on making your case my cause, and I do commit myself to serving it. I’ll help you be the person you really are. Just don’t bother that much”.
Adam’s sigh was of relief. The session was over.
Adam was a young man in his early twenties but owing to his short, trim, vulnerable physique, he looked eighteen at the most. With not as much as a glance, you could bet Adam fell into the category of the unapproachable. Once you drew nearer the mirage is no more, for you could approach him in more ways than one. On that humdrum sunless Friday morning in the summer of 2003 Adam was dressed in grey in a fashion that told of nothing but the greyness of his whole life.
Brooding in Limbo
The odds I Defied
With Valour Unprecedented
Browned off with the Fetters of Yesterday
The Sound of Silence I Chopped away
For in Confession Liberty finds way.
Such epigrammatic lines were among the few penned pieces Adam’s dossier comprised. Yet, they were so ample as to epitomize Adam’s present bearings and the course of action he had for ages craved yet wavered to take. While damn sure that upon consent rested his doom and demise he only couldn’t come up with a virile, crucial No. In fact, Adam’s life was as double and dual as hypocrisy itself. And if there was anyone in the world to be held responsible, it was Adam’s father. It was only now that Adam deemed it inextricable to cry out loud “No, No, No”, whenever he was compelled to nod in consent. I thus became his Mecca.
At this juncture, I feel compelled to strip off the mask I have hitherto borrowed to make known Adam’s life history and to probe his “raison d’être”. I am Miss Nora, as you must have already struck home, Adam’s psychiatrist. I was so magnetized by Adam that I decided against having him in my asylum uptown. Besides, it would have been no use: Adam would have barely agreed to the shock treatments we use in there.
“Amazing, impressive and creative” showed Adam’s school reports on English.
“I’d like you to be like Adam”, Adam’s ex-teacher of English would tell his class.
To tell the truth, Adam absorbed everything like a sponge and writing did squeeze him. Besides, he spoke English with such eloquence and accuracy that you could hardly tell him from a native speaker. The prizes Adam piled up were books among which he spent his day and night. As of old and late, Adam went on accumulating books which he used to call his “life’s joy”. Last year, Adam managed to kill two pigeons with one bullet and the loot was fit for a banquet. He came first in his third year at university, while pursuing his training year as a junior school teacher.
“Have you forgotten that you have a date tonight? Let’s go! It’s high time we went. The girls must be waiting”, said Said, Adam’s roommate, but to no end.
“Sorry. I can’t go. I have to finish this novel before tomorrow. You go and I’ll call Mary up and say sorry”.
“Well, Mr. Brainy, I’ll go but you’ll die stuck in one of those bloody books”.
Said, Adam’s chum and fellow teacher, wouldn’t have passed his third year at university hadn’t Adam coaxed him into taking the university exam:
“Come on, Said! I certainly find your indecision over this matter most unintelligible. Don’t you get it, man? Should we capitalize on this year, there’ll be only one year ahead of us to get our B.A”
Whilst swotting up once for the Orals just a year ago in the university library, Adam unbuttoned his brief- case to produce a piece of paper.
“Here you are” said Adam cheerily handing Said the paper.
“This paragraph marks the diminuendo in my short story. Scan it and give me your feed-back”, Adam went on even more gaily.
Dearest Mary,
I feel bound to confess a truth. I have always told you I love you but in fact I don’t. I lied to the very heart that showed me what love is and I held to the lie. To be frank with you, I loved your body for you’re a mermaid but loved you not for what you are. Maybe, I have never been worthy of the trust you lavished on me. But I am not sorry either. I am one that has never known love. I know that you‘re full of forgiveness and pity but do not sympathize with me. Hate me rather.
Hate me for a while and then forget me once and for all. You’re still young and the future is all yours out there in America where you’ll find yourself in a matter of days. Move on. Start a new phase in your life. For my part, I’m moving back already, melting down like wax being liquefied. Do not try to contact me for I don’t like to see anyone. I hate you Mary for you showed me what I really am. I hate my father for he has made me such a person, propelled me to play the fool I have never been, masquerade in a persona other than mine. Am I what I am? No, I am none. As I am writing you these lines I feel grim as all hell. But never mind Mary. It‘s high time you moved on. I wish you all the happiness your noble and true nature is worthy of. Thank you for what you showed me about love.
Adam
“Wow! Wonderful, just wonderful”, Said shouted in admiration.
“Oh! Is it really?” wondered Adam dubiously.
“Of course it is. It’s terse, well-written this passage and above all has the touch of a professional”, Said commented. “I’m dead sure you’ll be a great writer one day”, he added. Touched in the very kernel, Adam lapped up what he took for a compliment.
Admittedly, Adam dreamt of becoming a writer and a poet of non-such calibre, and this marked his first attempt at fiction. Adam always wanted to write a novel. Nonetheless, he knew that long was his way, though not far-fetched his dream.
It was four a.m and the moon was already giving up to the sun. Adam lay on his bed meditating on the new birth the world was about to witness. And it came to pass: Twilight. The day took over the night. Adam sat admiring the locale before the “muezzin” proclaimed the hour for “Alfajhr” prayer.