What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly…
…more and more slowly; he ended up stopping right at the corner of Transvaalstraat…
…as if he weren’t in any hurry to arrive — in the direction of his house (their house)…
…what is a house? “House” or “home”? Just a cube, a big cube, a cut-out space that the Land Registry had given to him…He watched television there, slept there, watched out of the corner of his eye a beautiful young blonde woman sitting on the sofa, next to him, sometimes forgetting who she was…
…ah yes, it’s my wife…(my wife? What does the possessive signify? What, exactly, do I possess? Am I not rather the thing that is possessed, the domesticated animal — there must be a tiger or a lion at the zoo in Amsterdam who believes he possesses something, who thinks he’s wandering around in his home and that the little piece of wood in the form of a tree is his own, beware of the one who comes to rub himself there — it’s the conspiracy of the Tall-Blonde-Bach-amateurs that possesses me in the most subtle of manners — I am in their trap — their chains — so be it, I will end up in the cellar, in the hold of a ship beaten by the waves, heading toward the plantation, the zoo…)
…where his wife Anna was waiting — sweet, kind Anna — but sweet and kind because he never annoyed her…
…he had become someone who gives up, a sâdhu…“Are you two sure you’re married? (It was their neighbor who had said this, loquacious, knowing…) You never fight.” Exactly, he could have responded: I have renounced — in a world of discord — I have abstracted myself from the world, I am an abstraction—indeed, they talk about me that way. Maati? What a curious name…What are you? (What.) Ah, Moroccan…then comes the succession of adjectives, the abstraction clarifies: Muslim, probably macho, lover of complicated things, tom-tom, and isn’t there a big desert in your country? (In my country? I live on Transvaalstraat, in Utrecht.) No, I mean: in your country.
…having decided once and for all that he would move to the Netherlands, that they had accepted him (they had even given him a passport)…
Who had given him a passport? The State, “the coldest of the cold monsters”…Not the neighbor: she probably would have hesitated. You, my compatriot? But do you have, as I do, thirty lifeless bodies in a vault? They are my ancestors, lying down, stiff, they stand guard, in a perpetual procession, where the squirrels run. I go there to decorate their tombs with flowers, you seem to me more like someone who comes to spit on the graves — I have never seen people like you on All Saints’ Day, at the cemetery with its pleasant alignment of marble statues…
…and that it was out of the question, consequently, to import anything of his own customs, habits, behaviors from his native Morocco…
…what did he know of them, anyway?
…into this country where he was rebuilding his life — no: where he was continuing his life — Anna whom he had ended up marrying in order to settle down (isn’t that what it was called, in times past, in the world of Parisian courtesans? (Doesn’t Proust use this expression somewhere? Concerning Odette, perhaps?)…
…it had been years since he had last read Proust. He no longer had the opportunity to use him. Or to share him. Simenon, sometimes, not even… the newspaper…the sports pages…the television…
— Oh Maati, you and your French references…and sometimes she would add, with a smile: You aren’t even French, you’re Moroccan!
That sounds like a reproach. At the corner of Transvaalstraat, where a hundred absolutely identical houses trace converging lines toward the void, everything seems like an accusation that the court clerk, one foresees, will end up summarizing with the following question asked in a glacial tone: “What are you doing here?”
(It wasn’t mean, just a bit teasing — Anna didn’t establish any hierarchy between Moroccans and the French…)
…nor between the Chinese and the Peruvians, nor between anyone and anybody, like a good little Protestant…
…which stunned him, and for which he was extremely grateful to her—
…up until this instant, this dislocation, Transvaalstraat; he didn’t recognize gratitude for anything anymore, he didn’t recognize anything anymore; he would have preferred that she treat him like a Chinese person rather than say to him: “You are other, but that’s okay, we forgive you, and you’re equal to all the others”—just as at the zoo, the tiger seems to be the equal of the porcupine, they are fed in the same way, they are loved the same and the placard in front of the enclosure, which designates them very scientifically, which situates them (there is a map of the world and a red spot to mark the territory where they toil away), so, what about the placard? It’s the same for alclass="underline" tiger, porcupine, or bonobo — but Anna, you’re outside of the enclosure, it’s your father, younger, beard less white, who points at the bonobo and reads aloud for you the description provided on the placard…
…it was so new, a country where he was just as well regarded, or just as poorly regarded [depending on the person], as the French. At least there’s that in exile.) He had tried one day to explain to her that he was Moroccan by birth, in body, but “French in the head.”…
…what does that mean, exactly? It’s absurd…it’s tiresome…my God, everything is escaping me…It’s my mind, fittingly, that’s liquefying—“France, your coffee is escaping!”—and what will remain, what remains of our loves, if our mind goes to the dogs, nothing but a body, a big sick body, on its back, bigger dead than alive…
(Suddenly he remembered the title of the novel-essay by Günter Grass, Headbirths or, the Germans are Dying Out. Today he could read it in German: Kopfgeburten oder die Deutschen sterben aus…
…a lot of good it does you! A lot of good it does me! Who is speaking? Who is shouting at me? Who are these snakes…
While learning Dutch, he had incidentally also learned German. At least there’s that, in exile (bis). I’m cold, he said to himself sometimes with bitter irony, I’m cold and I eat tasteless things, but at least I’ve learned German, the language of the philosophers, and now I know the exact meaning of aufheben. We were really impressed by them, the Althussers and the consorts, the Derridas, the Glucksmanns, in Paris, when they threw out words like that one, without translating them, as if they were using an abracadabra only they could access.)
If they were here, on this street, I would throw a big stone at their heads, a rock I would first need to lift up, aufheben—but then who, but then what is it in me that enjoys making such bad bilingual puns? Who-then-what-then forces my mouth into a sneer — come on, it’s not that funny! — when I’m in the middle of dislocating myself, on the corner of this street…