Chaos of the Senses by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

Author:Ahlem Mosteghanemi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408857281
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-07-14T01:13:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Inevitably

WE ALWAYS ARRIVE AT love just a bit late.

Then we knock cautiously on somebody’s heart, apologizing before the fact for a sentiment that we know will vanish the minute it appears.

Love repeats itself in various forms, with beginnings that give birth to lofty dreams, and with precipitous, excruciating endings. So we learn to expect love’s drunken driver to deliver us to disappointment’s door.

The dream matures by necessity, but before the time is ripe. So what use is it for the heart to grow up so fast?

When Eid al-Adha arrived, Constantine was awaited by another sort of occasion.

I returned to the city, my heart suffering from multiple fractures. As I struggled out from under the wreckage of a dream, gasping for breath beneath a massive heap of illusions, Constantine presented me with a face I didn’t recognize. Its streets were piled high with refuse, since the Islamists had commandeered the rubbish collectors’ dustcarts to force them to join the open strike, leaving the city’s stray cats to celebrate the holiday alone.

I was in a hurry to get back to my house, where all I could hear was the city’s loud bustle as it prepared for its holiday, and the bleating of the sheep awaiting slaughter the next morning.

I’d always hated holidays, and this one promised to be the saddest of them all. It was a holiday of absence. The feeling of absence came over me as I woke up on the morning of Eid, since there was nobody in the house, other than the maid, to wish a happy holiday. There wasn’t anybody to call, either, except for Uncle Ahmad’s wife, whose voice over the phone made me feel all the sadder since it revived my feeling of guilt towards her.

My husband had left the house early in anticipation of possible demonstrations or unrest after the end of the holiday prayer. Farida had gone as usual to spend the day with her family. My mother wasn’t back from the pilgrimage yet, and Nasser wasn’t at home to answer the telephone when I called. Even the sheep, which had been outside in the yard, weren’t there any more. Or, rather, all that was left of them were blood stains on the ground and carcasses hung up on hooks and being skinned by a butcher.

What do people do on the morning of the holiday but attack sheep’s carcasses: skinning them, cutting them to pieces, dividing them up? No one here, no matter how limited his means or humble his abode, could conceive of Eid al-Adha without slaughtering a sheep. So I was used to seeing people scurrying around on the morning of Eid al-Adha, the men to the open areas set up specially for the ritual slaughter, and the women to their kitchens, where they would divide up the animals, keep the parts they needed, and distribute the rest as alms.

That particular year I expected the need for alms distribution to be greater than ever. The price of a single sheep came

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