What the day owes the nigth

by Yasmina Khadra

  And so I cried and I prayed, and as the months passed, the ceiling above my bed slowly went back to being just a ceiling. Taking Lucette by the hand, I went back to school. There were hundreds of other children like me, children who had done nothing wrong and who, like me, had suffered some tragedy and were patiently serving out their time, coping as best they could. If they did not ask questions it was because they knew they would not like the answers.

  Mysterious guests continued to show up at my uncle’s house in the dead of night. They would arrive one by one and sit for hours with my uncle in the living room, smoking like chimneys – the whole house reeked of cigarette smoke. Their meetings always followed the same course: at first their discussion was calm and full of thoughtful silences, then it would become loud and impassioned, threatening to wake the neighbours. My uncle would take advantage of his position as master of the house to pour oil on troubled waters. If they could not agree, they would go out to the garden for some air and I would watch the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the darkness. When the meeting was over, they would tiptoe out, one by one, carefully checking to make sure no one was watching, then disappear into the night.

  The morning after these meetings, I would invariably find my uncle in his study, jotting notes in a large hardback notebook.

  One night, my uncle asked me to come and join his guests in the living room. He proudly introduced me to them. I recognised some of the faces. The meeting that night was different, less strained, almost solemn. Only one man spoke, the others hanging on his words. He was a man of great charisma, and clearly an honoured guest; my uncle was obviously in awe of him. Only much later did I put a name to his face: it was Messali Hadj, the guiding light of the movement for Algerian independence.

  In Europe, war exploded like a blister.

  Poland fell to the Nazi jackboots with terrifying ease. Where everyone had predicted fierce resistance there were only a few pitiful skirmishes, quickly crushed by the advancing Panzer divisions. The stunning success of the Nazi forces provoked terror and fascination. People began to turn their attention northward and watch as events on the far side of the Mediterranean played out. The news was not good; the spectre of an all-consuming conflagration haunted them. On café terraces men sat poring over their fears in the newspapers. People stopped each other in the street, they argued, they gathered in bars or in parks and talked in hushed whispers about how Europe was on the road to ruin. At school, our teachers no longer paid us any attention. They would arrive every morning with more news, more questions, and leave every evening with the same fears, the same anxieties. The headmaster had gone so far as to install a wireless in his office, where he spent most of the day listening to the news, indifferent to the thugs and bullies who now ran amok in the playground.

  Germaine no longer took me out on Sundays after mass, instead she disappeared, shutting herself away in her room, kneeling in front of the cross, intoning interminable litanies. She had no family in Europe, but still she prayed that reason would triumph over madness.

  Since my uncle also began to disappear more and more often, going out with a briefcase full of tracts and pamphlets under his coat, I relied more and more on Lucette for company. We would lose ourselves in our games until we heard a voice telling us it was time for dinner or time to go to bed.

  Lucette’s father, Jérôme, was an engineer in a factory close to where we lived. At home, he spent much of his time with his nose in an engineering book or lying on the sofa listening to Schubert on the gramophone, and so no longer bothered to check to see what we were up to. Jérôme was tall and thin, his face half hidden behind thick round glasses, and he seemed to live in his own little world, careful to keep his distance from everyone and everything, including this war that seemed about to consume the whole planet. Summer and winter he wore the same khaki shirt with its breast pocket stuffed full of pens. He only ever spoke if we asked him a question, and even then he answered as though we were interrupting him. His wife had left him some years after Lucette was born and he had never quite got over it. Though he could not refuse Lucette anything, I never saw him hug her. At the cinema, where he always took us to see silent serials, I would have sworn that as soon as the lights went out, he disappeared. At times he frightened me, especially when he casually told my uncle he was an atheist. I had not realised before that moment that atheists existed. I was surrounded by believers: my uncle was Muslim, Germaine was Catholic, all our other neighbours were Jewish or Christian. At school and in the street, everyone talked about God, believed in God – I was shocked to discover Jérôme getting by without Him. Once, I overheard him tell an evangelist who called to his house: ‘Every man is his own god. In choosing to follow another god he denies himself and in doing so becomes blind and unjust.’ The evangelist looked at Jérôme as though he were the Devil incarnate.

  On the Feast of the Ascension, Jérôme took Lucette and me to the top of Djebel Murdjadjo to see the city. We visited the medieval fortress on the mountaintop before joining the crowds of pilgrims flocking to the basilica of Our Lady of Santa Cruz. There were hundreds of them: women, old men and children, all milling around the base of the statue of the Virgin Mary. Some had come up the mountain barefoot, clutching at the broom and the bushes for support; others had climbed up on their knees, which were now scratched and bleeding. The pilgrims stood under the blazing sun as though in a trance, their eyes rolled back in their heads, their faces pale, imploring their guardian angels, beseeching the Almighty himself to spare their miserable lives. They were Spaniards, Lucette explained, and they made the pilgrimage every year to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for sparing Oran from the cholera epidemic of 1849 that had wiped out thousands of families.

  ‘But look at them,’ I said, shocked by the extent of their self-inflicted injuries.

  ‘They do it for God,’ Lucette said fervently. ‘God never asked them to do this,’ Jérôme interrupted, and his voice, like a whip crack, put paid to my curiosity. I no longer saw these people as pilgrims, but as cursed souls. If truth be told, Hell never seemed closer than it did to me on holy days. All my life I had been warned of the evils of blasphemy. Nor did you to have to utter a blasphemy to be damned; simply to overhear it was a sin. Lucette sensed that I was upset. I could see that she was angry with her father, but I couldn’t bring myself to respond to her embarrassed smile. I wanted to go home.

  We took the bus back to the city, but the twisting cliff roads to Vieil Oran simply made me feel worse. At every bend in the road I thought I might be sick. Whereas usually when we were in the old town, Lucette and I liked to wander around La Scalera, eat paella or a caldero in a cheap Spanish café or buy trinkets from the Sephardic craftsmen in the old Jewish quarter, that day my heart wasn’t in it. What Jérôme had said had cast a pall over the day. I feared his blasphemy would bring about some catastrophe.

  We took the tram back to the European sector of the city and then walked home. The weather was magnificent, and yet the sunlit streets felt strange and dreamlike. Lucette squeezed my hand, but I could not seem to wake up.

  And then the catastrophe I had feared hit me like a thunderbolt. Our street was teeming with crowds of people; all the neighbours had come out and were standing around, arms folded across their chests. Jérôme gave a puzzled look to a man in shorts standing at his gate, who had clearly been watering his garden. The man turned off the hose and set it down, wiped his hands on his shirt, then spread them wide to indicate his bafflement.

  ‘There must be some mistake. The police have arrested Monsieur Mahi, the chemist. They’ve just taken him away in a police van. The cops didn’t look too happy.’

  My uncle spent a week in custody. When he was finally released, he waited until dark before he dared to come back to the house. His face was gaunt, his eyes lifeless, the few short days he had spent in jail had changed him completely. He was barely recognisable. An unkempt beard emphasised his pallor, making him look like a ghost. He looked as though he had not eaten or sle
pt in prison.

  Germaine’s relief at her husband’s return was short-lived when she realised that he had not been returned to her whole. My uncle seemed to be in a constant daze. He found it difficult to understand what was said to him; he jumped if Germaine asked whether she could get him; anything. At night I heard him pacing up and down, mumbling and cursing. Sometimes, when I looked up from the garden, I would see him standing at the window, framed behind the curtains, constantly scanning the street as though expecting the Devil himself to arrive.

  Forced to take over the running of the business, Germaine now had little time to spend on me. She was terrified – her husband was having a breakdown and refused to see a doctor. Sometimes she would stand, sobbing, in the middle of the living room.

  Jérôme took over responsibility for taking me to school. Every morning, smiling and cheery, her hair in ribbons, Lucette would call for me. She would take my hand and we would run to catch up with her father at the end of the street.

  I assumed that after a few weeks my uncle would be back to his old self. Instead, he got worse. He began to lock himself away in his study and would refuse to open the door when we knocked. It was as though there was an evil spirit in the house. Germaine was frantic. I was mystified. Why had my uncle been arrested? What had happened at the police station? Why would he not talk about what had happened in custody, even to Germaine? The secrets a house is desperate to conceal will, sooner or later, be shouted from the rooftops. A cultured, well-read man, aware of the upheavals in the Arab world, my uncle had been a supporter on an intellectual level of the nationalist cause spreading through educated Muslim circles. He had learned the speeches of Shakaib Arslan by heart, cut militant articles out of the newspapers that he catalogued, annotated and wrote dissertations on. Obsessed with the theoretical aspects of political upheaval, he had not realised the risks of his actions. All that he knew about political activism were his flights of rhetoric, the secret contributions he made to fund workshops, the clandestine night-time meetings at our house. Though committed to the cause of Algerian nationalism, he was drawn to the principle rather than to the radical activism espoused by members of the Parti du Peuple Algérien. It would never have occurred to him that he would ever set foot inside a police station, let alone spend the night in a stinking cell with rats and thugs for company. My uncle was a pacifist, a hypothetical democrat, an intellectual who put his faith in words, in demonstrations, in slogans, with a visceral hatred of violence. He was a law-abiding citizen, keenly aware of the social standing conferred on him by his university education and his profession as a chemist. He could never have imagined that the police would come for him one night while he was sitting in his armchair, feet up on an ottoman, reading El Ouma, the party newsletter.

  The gossips said that before the police even put him in the van my uncle was a broken man, that he had confessed everything he knew as soon as he was questioned. They said that it was only because he had been so co operative that the police released him without charge – an allegation he would deny to his dying day. Unable to bear the gossip and the slander, he suffered several breakdowns.

  When he recovered some measure of sanity, he told Germaine what he had planned: there could be no question of us going on living in Oran. We had to move.

  ‘The police are trying to turn me against my own people,’ he confided wearily. ‘Can you imagine? How could they think that they could ever get me to do that? Do I look like a traitor, Germaine? For the love of heaven, how could I possibly inform on my friends, my colleagues . . . ?’

  From now on, he told her, he would be under constant surveillance, something which in itself would put his friends in danger.

  ‘Do you at least have somewhere in mind?’ Germaine asked, clearly devastated at the idea of having to leave her home town.

  ‘We’ll move to Río Salado.’

  ‘Why Río Salado?’

  ‘It’s a quiet little town. I went there the other day to look into the possibility of opening a pharmacy. I found a place – the ground floor of a large house . . .’

  ‘You want us to sell everything here in Oran: the shop, the house, everything?’

  ‘We have no choice.’

  ‘But if we do, then we can never come back, where we dreamed—’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What if things don’t work out in Río Salado?’

  ‘Then we’ll move to Tlemcen, or to Sidi Bel Abbès, or out into the Sahara. God’s earth is vast, Germaine, or have you forgotten?’

  Somewhere it was written that I was born to leave my home, to constantly leave, each time leaving a part of me behind.

  Lucette stood in the doorway of her house, hands behind her back, leaning against the wall. She refused to believe me when I told her we were moving away. Now, seeing the truck arrive, she was upset with me. I couldn’t bring myself to cross the street and tell her that I was upset too. I simply stood and watched the movers load our furniture and our trunks into the truck. It was as though they were taking my whole world to pieces.

  Germaine helped me up into the cab. The truck roared. I leaned out to look back at Lucette, hoping she might wave; she kept her hands behind her back. It was as though she didn’t believe I was really leaving, or perhaps she simply refused to accept it.

  As the truck pulled away, the driver blocked my view of Lucette, so I craned my neck in the hope of taking with me the glimmer of a smile, some sign that she realised that this was not my fault, that I was as devastated as she was. But nothing . . . The street flashed by in a roar of metal and then disappeared.

  Goodbye, Lucette.

  For a long time I thought it had been her eyes that filled my soul with a gentle peace. Now I know that it was not simply her eyes, it was the way she looked at me – the gentle, caring, maternal expression of a girl not yet a woman . . .

  Río Salado was only sixty kilometres west of Oran, but this journey was the longest I have ever known. The truck coughed and spluttered like a camel on its last legs, the engine stalling every time the driver changed gears. He wore trousers spattered with oil and grease, and his shirt had seen better days. He was a short, stocky man with broad shoulders and a face like a veteran boxer. He drove in silence, his hairy hands like tarantulas gripping the steering wheel. Her face pressed to the window, Germaine said nothing, but stared out at the orange groves that lined the road. Her hands were clasped, half hidden in her lap; I realised that she was praying.

  We had to slow to a crawl as we drove through the village of Misserghin. It was market day and the road was lined with carts and stalls; housewives bustled about, and here and there were Bedouins – recognisable from their turbans – offering their services as porters. A policeman strutted around the town square, twirling his truncheon lazily. His kepi pulled down over his eyes, he greeted the women respectfully as he passed, turning back afterwards to catch a glimpse of their behinds.

  ‘My names is Costa.’ The driver spoke suddenly. ‘Coco to my friends.’

  He shot Germaine a glance and, seeing her smile politely, went on:

  ‘I’m Greek.’

  He shifted in his seat.

  ‘I own a half-share in this truck. I might not look like a rich man, but it’s true. Soon I’ll be my own boss and I will never have to leave my office. The men in the back, they are Italian. They can unload a steamship in half a day. They have been hauliers since they were in their mother’s womb.’

  His big eyes, set in rolls of fat, twinkled now.

  ‘You know, madame, you look just like my cousin Mélina. When we arrived this morning, I thought I was seeing things. It’s incredible how much you look like her. You have the same hair, the same eyes, you are the same height. I don’t suppose you’re Greek, madame?

  ‘No, monsieur.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘From Oran. Fourth generation.’

  ‘Really? Perhaps one of your ancestors crossed swords with the patron saint of Arabs. Me, I have only been in Alge
ria fifteen years. I was a sailor, we put into port here, and it was here I met Berthe in a funduq. The moment I set eyes on her, I thought, this is where I will stay. I married Berthe and we settled in La Scalera. Oran is a beautiful city.’

  ‘It is,’ Germaine said sadly. ‘A very beautiful city.’

  The driver swerved to avoid two donkeys standing in the middle of the road. The furniture in the back of the truck groaned and the Italian movers swore loudly in their own language.

  The driver straightened up the truck and accelerated hard enough to blow a gasket.

  ‘Cut your chatter and keep your eyes on the road, Coco,’ one of the Italians yelled.

  The driver nodded and fell silent.

  A lush landscape flashed past, orange groves and vineyards jostling for space across the plains and the hills. Here and there, on rocky outcrops overlooking the scrubland, were beautiful farmhouses, ringed by majestic trees and lavish gardens, the driveways leading to them lined with olive trees and willowy palms. Every now and then we would see a colonial farmer walking his fields, or on horseback, galloping flat out towards some unseen joy. Then, without warning, like a pockmark in this fairytale landscape, we would see some squalid shack, crushed by the weight of poverty and the evil eye. Some of these shacks, out of a sense of decency, were hidden behind screens of tall cacti – all we could see was the ramshackle roof, which looked about to collapse on the people below; others clung to the rocky hillsides, their doorways ugly as a toothless smile, their cob walls pale and pitted as a death mask.

  The driver turned to Germaine again and said:

  ‘It’s incredible how much you look like my cousin Mélina.’

  2. Río Salado

  8

  I LOVE Río Salado – the place the Romans called Fulmen Salsum and one we now call El Malah. I have loved this town all my life; I cannot imagine growing old beneath any other sky, cannot imagine dying far from these ghosts. It was a beautiful colonial village with leafy streets lined with magnificent houses. The main square, where dances were held and famous musical troupes came to play, unfurled its flagstone carpet a stone’s throw from the steps of the town hall, flanked by tall palm trees strung together by garlands studded with Chinese lanterns. The great jazz musician Aimé Barelli performed here, and bandleader Xavier Cugat with his famous chihuahua, as well as Jacques Hélian and Pérez Prado. The town attracted artists and orchestras that even Oran, for all its charm and its standing as the capital of the West, could not afford. Río Salado liked to flaunt its wealth, to avenge itself on all those who for years had written it off. The ostentatious mansions that lined the main street were the town’s way of telling passers-by that ostentation was a virtue if it meant refuting others’ preconceptions, if it meant enduring every hardship in order to catch the moon. The land here had once been a stony wilderness left to lizards, the only human soul a shepherd passing, never to return; it was a landscape of scrubland and dry riverbeds, the domain of boars and hyenas – a land forgotten by men and angels. Those pilgrims who passed this way raced through like gusts of wind as though it were a cursed cemetery. Later, exiles and nomads, Spaniards mostly, laid claim to this desolate land, which mirrored their suffering. These men rolled up their sleeves and set about taming this savage landscape. They uprooted the mastic trees and replaced them with vineyards, ploughed and hoed the wasteland to create farms, and from their Herculean efforts Río Salado blossomed, as green shoots grew over mass graves.