What the day owes the nigth

by Yasmina Khadra

  He pushes his wheelchair towards me.

  ‘I can walk,’ he insists. ‘I’m just a little heavy . . .’

  We throw our arms around each other and the tears that were misting our eyes begin to trickle down; we do not even try to stop them. We cry, we laugh, we slap each other on the back.

  Evening surprises us, still sitting at the table, laughing and hacking hard enough to cough up our lungs. Krimo, who arrived an hour ago, is no longer angry with me. He said all he had to say at the cemetery; he is sitting facing me, feeling guilty about the things we said to each other, but he has the tranquil air of someone who has come to terms with things. It was a long time before he dared to look up at me. That done, he joins in our tales of Río Salado, about the end-of-season balls, the grape harvests, camping out in the moonlight, the drinking sessions and getting our leg over afterwards, about Pépé Rucillio and his secret escapades; not once does he recall anything unpleasant, any painful memory.

  Michel’s wife Martine, a strapping woman from Aoulef, half Berber, half Breton, whips up a bouillabaisse of gargantuan proportions. The rouille is delicious and the fish tender.

  ‘You still don’t drink?’ Dédé asks me.

  ‘Not a drop.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

  ‘If only that was all I was missing.’

  He pours himself a glass, looks at it, and knocks it back in one.

  ‘Is it true there’s no wine-making in Río Salado any more?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Fuck . . . what a waste. I swear there are times when I can still taste that glorious wine we used to make, Alicante d’El Maleh; it made us want to drink and drink until we couldn’t tell a pumpkin from an old woman’s arse.’

  ‘The agricultural revolution ripped out all the vineyards in the area.’

  ‘What did they plant instead?’ Gustave asked indignantly. ‘Potatoes?’

  André moves the bottle standing on the table between us.

  ‘What about Jelloul? What’s happened to him? I know he was a captain in the Algerian army and that he was in charge of a military sector in the Sahara, but I haven’t had any news of him for a couple of years now.’

  ‘By the time he retired in 1990 he was a colonel. He never did live in Río Salado; he bought a little villa in Oran where he planned to live out his days. But then the riots started. A terrorist from the Armed Islamic Group gunned him down outside his own house, shot him with a single bullet while he was sitting daydreaming on his porch.’

  André started, suddenly sober.

  ‘Jelloul is dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Killed by a terrorist?’

  ‘By an emir in the AIG. And wait till you hear this, Dédé: it was his own nephew.’

  ‘Jelloul was killed by his own nephew?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘My God, there’s a terrible irony there.’

  Fabrice Scamaroni doesn’t arrive until late in the evening because of the railway strike. The round of hugs and handshakes strikes up again. Fabrice and I have never lost touch. He is an important journalist and a successful writer. I often see him on television. He regularly comes back to Algeria on assignments for his paper and always makes the most of it and comes down to Río Salado. He stays at my house. Every time he visits, rain or snow, he and I get up early in the morning and go to the Christian cemetery to visit his father’s grave. His mother died during the 1970s when a cruise ship sank off the coast of Sardinia.

  The table by now is strewn with wine bottles. We have resurrected our dead and drunk to their memory; asked after the living: what became of so-and-so, why did he decide to go and live in Argentina, why did so-and-so move to Morocco? André is drunk as a lord, but he’s holding up well. Bruno and Gustave keep running from the garden to the bathroom. I keep glancing towards the gate.

  One person is still missing: Jean-Christophe Lamy.

  I know that he’s still alive, that he and Isabelle have been running a thriving business on the Côte d’Azur. Why isn’t he here? Nice is barely a couple of hours by car from Aix. André made it here from Bastia, Bruno from Perpignan, Krimo from Spain, Fabrice from Paris, Gustave from Saôneet-Loire. Is Jean-Christophe still angry with me? What did I do to him? In retrospect, nothing . . . I didn’t do anything. I loved him like a brother, and like a brother I wept for him when he left, trailing the dust of a generation on his heels.

  ‘Earth to Jonas!’ Bruno shakes my shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are you dreaming about? I’ve been talking to you for five minutes.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . you were saying?’

  ‘I was talking about the old country. I was saying that we were orphaned by our country.’

  ‘And I was orphaned by my friends – I don’t know which of us lost more, but it doesn’t matter, it takes the same toll on the heart.’

  ‘I don’t really think you lost more than we did on the deal, Jonas.’

  ‘C’est la vie,’ André says philosophically. ‘Life gives with one hand and takes away with the other. But it’s not the same, it’s not the same thing at all . . . losing your friends or losing your country. It eats me up inside just thinking about it. If you want proof, round here we don’t talk about nostalgia, we say nost-algeria.’

  He takes a deep breath, his eyes glittering in the lamplight.

  ‘Algeria still clings to me,’ he confesses. ‘Sometimes it burns like the Tunic of Nessus, sometimes it envelops me like a delicate perfume. I’ve tried to shake it off, but I can’t. How can I forget it? I’ve tried to stop thinking about my youth, to move on, to start with a clean slate. I can’t. I’ve tried to summon all the horrors, to spew them out, to be rid of them once and for all, but it’s no use . . . The memories of the sun, the beaches, the streets, the food we ate, the glorious drunken nights we spent together, the happy times always overshadow the rage, and though I start out snarling I find myself smiling. I’ve never forgotten Río Salado, Jonas. Not for a day, not for a second. I remember every tuft of grass on our hill, every witty remark on the café terraces, and Simon’s jokes and antics even overshadow his death, as though he was determined not to let us associate his tragic death with our dreams of Algeria. I swear, I’ve tried to forget them. More than anything, I have wanted to rip out every memory with a pair of pliers, like pulling out a rotten tooth. I’ve been all over the world, to Latin America, to Asia, to try to get some distance, to reinvent myself somewhere else. I needed to prove to myself that there were other countries, that a homeland can be rebuilt like a new family; but it’s not true. I only have to stop for a second and the bled seeps back into me; I only have to turn around to see it, there where my shadow should be.’

  ‘If we’d left of our own free will that would be one thing,’ protests Gustave, who is two sips from alcoholic poisoning. ‘But we were forced to leave everything, to run away, our suitcases filled with ghosts and grief. Everything was taken from us, even our souls. We were left with nothing, with less than nothing, not even eyes to weep with. It wasn’t fair, Jonas. Not everyone was a colonist, not everyone went round slapping a riding crop against their aristocratic boots; some of us didn’t have any boots at all. We had our own poor, our own poor neighbourhoods, our own dispossessed, our own good Samaritans, we had small craftsmen who were smaller than yours, and more often than not we prayed the same prayers. Why were we all treated as an indiscriminate mass? Why did we have to be lumped together with a handful of feudal lords? Why were we made to feel like outsiders in a country where our fathers and our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers were born? Why were we made to feel like usurpers in a country we built with our own hands and watered with our sweat, our blood? For as long as we don’t know the answer, the wound will never heal . . .’

  The direction the conversation is taking unsettles me. Krimo is already knocking back one glass after another; I’m worried that he will start in on the exchange we had in the gra
veyard.

  ‘You know, Jonas . . .’ he says suddenly; it is the first thing he has said to me since our encounter in the graveyard. ‘I really want Algeria to come through this all right.’

  ‘It’ll come through,’ says Fabrice. ‘Algeria is dormant El Dorado. All it needs is a soul. Right now, it’s searching for that soul in all the wrong places, so it’s hardly surprising that it’s a tragedy. But it’s a young country, it has time to grow.’

  Bruno grasps my hand and squeezes it hard.

  ‘I’d like to go back to Río Salado, even if only for a couple of days.’

  ‘Who’s stopping you?’ says André. ‘There are flights to Oran and Tlemcen every day. In an hour and a half you can be up to your neck in shit.’

  We laugh loud enough to wake the whole neighbourhood.

  ‘Seriously,’ says Bruno.

  ‘Seriously what?’ I say. ‘Dédé’s right. You can jump on a plane and in less than two hours you can be home, for a day or for ever. Río Salado hasn’t changed much. Oh, it’s a bit more depressing than it was: the flowers have withered, the wine cellars are gone and the vineyards have all disappeared, but the people there are wonderful and charming. If you come to visit me, you’ll have to visit everyone else, and eternity will not be long enough.’

  Michel drives me back to my hotel shortly after midnight and walks me up to my room, where he gives me a small metal case locked with a padlock.

  ‘A few days before she died, my mother asked me to give this to you personally. If you hadn’t come, I would have had to make a trip to Río Salado.’

  I take the case, stare at the flaking design on the lid. It is an antique candy box with engravings of scenes from aristocratic life, noblemen in their gardens, princes flirting with beautiful girls in the shade of a fountain; from the weight, there cannot be much inside it.

  ‘I’ll come by and pick you up tomorrow at ten a.m. We’ll have lunch at the house of André Sosa’s niece in Manosque.’

  ‘I’ll see you at ten o’clock. And thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Monsieur Jonas. Good night.’

  He leaves.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, holding the box in my hands. What postscript has Émilie left me, what message from beyond the grave? I picture again the Rue des Frères-Julien in Marseille, that day in March 1964; I can see her face, like a mask of bronze, her bloodless lips crushing my last hope of making up for lost time. My hand is trembling; the cold metal chills me to the bone. I have to open it. What difference does it make whether it is a music box or Pandora’s box? At eighty, the future is behind us; all that lies ahead is the past.

  I open the tiny padlock, lift the lid: letters . . . There is nothing inside but letters. Dozens of envelopes yellowed by time and blistered by damp; others look as though they have been crumpled up and smoothed again. I recognise my handwriting on the envelopes, stamps from my own country . . . and I realise why Émilie never wrote back to me: she never opened my letters, never opened my cards.

  I tip the envelopes on to the bed, check every one of them, hoping to come upon a letter from her. There is one, a recent one, still firm to the touch, with no stamp and no address, only my name written on the front, the envelope sealed with a piece of sellotape.

  I cannot bring myself to open it.

  Perhaps tomorrow . . .

  We have lunch in Manosque, at the house of André’s niece. Here again we trot out old stories, but we are beginning to run out of steam. Another pied-noir comes to see us. When I hear his voice, I think Jean-Christophe Lamy has finally arrived and the thought breathes new life into me, only to fade just as quickly when I realise it isn’t him. The stranger stays for about an hour and then leaves. He listens to our stories but cannot make head or tail of them, and he realises that though he comes from the outskirts of Oran – from Lamorcière, near Tlemcen – he is intruding on a private conversation, disturbing something he does not understand. Bruno and Krimo are the next to go, first to Perpignan, where Krimo will spend the night at his friend’s house before crossing the border into Spain. At about four o’clock, we leave and drop Fabrice at the TGV station outside Aix-en-Provence.

  ‘Do you really have to go back tomorrow?’ Fabrice asks. ‘Hélène would love to see you. Paris is only three hours by train; you could fly back to Algeria from Orly. I live near the airport.’

  ‘Some other time, Fabrice. Give Hélène my love. Is she still writing?’

  ‘She retired a long time ago.’

  The train pulls in, a magnificent beast. Fabrice hops up on to the step, hugs me one last time, and goes to find his seat. The train pulls off, moving away slowly. I crane my neck to see Fabrice through the carriage windows, and there he is, standing, one hand raised in a salute. Then the train sweeps him away.

  Back in Aix, Gustave offers to take us to Les Deux Garçons. After dinner, we stroll up the Cours Mirabeau. The weather is mild, the café terraces are still full, young people are queuing outside the cinemas. A dishevelled musician is sitting in the middle of the esplanade retuning his violin, his dog curled up next to him.

  Outside my hotel, two pedestrians and a driver are yelling at each other. Having run out of arguments, the driver climbs back into his car, slamming the door behind him.

  My friends leave me in the capable hands of the receptionist and promise to pick me up at seven a.m. to drop me at the airport.

  I take a hot shower and slip into bed.

  On the nightstand is Émilie’s box, as immutable as a funerary urn. My hand automatically reaches out and unfastens the padlock, but does not dare lift the lid.

  I can’t get to sleep. I try to clear my mind. I hug the pillows, turn on to my left side, on to my back. I feel miserable. Sleep isolates me and I don’t want to be alone in the dark. A private conversation with myself does not appeal. I need to be surrounded by courtiers, to share my frustrations, to designate scapegoats. When you can’t find a remedy for your pain, you look for someone to blame. My pain is nebulous. I feel a sadness, but I can’t put my finger on the cause. Émilie? Jean-Christophe? Old age? The letter waiting for me in the box? Why didn’t Jean-Christophe come? Does he still bear me that ancient grudge?

  Through the window, which is open on to the deep blue sky where the moon glitters like a medal, I prepare myself to watch, in slow motion, the parade of my misdeeds, my joys, the familiar faces. I hear them arrive, a thunderous roar like a rockslide. How should I sort them? How should I behave? I am going round in circles on the edge of an abyss, an acrobat on a razor’s edge, a mesmerised volcanologist on the edge of a bubbling crater; I am at the gates of memory, the endless reels of film we all file away, the great dark drawers stocked with the ordinary heroes we once were, the Camusian myths we never could embody, the actors and the roles we played, genius and grotesque, beautiful and monstrous, bowed beneath the weight of our small acts of cowardice, our feats of arms, our lies, our confessions, our oaths and recantations, our gallantry and desertion, our certainties and doubts; in short, our indomitable illusions. What to keep of all these reels of film, what to throw away? If we could take only one memory on our journey, what would we choose? At the expense of what or whom? And most importantly, how to choose among all these shadows, all these spectres, all these titans? Who are we, when all is said and done? Are we the people we once were or the people we wish we had been? Are we the pain we caused others or the pain we suffered at the hands of others? The encounters we missed or those fortuitous meetings that changed the course of our destiny? Our time behind the scenes that saved us from our vanity or the moment in the limelight that warmed us? We are all of these things, we are the whole life that we have lived, its highs and lows, its fortunes and its hardships; we are the sum of the ghosts that haunt us . . . we are a host of characters in one, so convincing in every role we played that it is impossible for us to tell who we really were, who we have become, who we will be.

  I listen to the voices of the past; I am no longer alone. Whispers whirl in these
splinters of memory like fragments of a vast sound: cryptic phrases, strangled cries, laughter and sobbing impossible to tell apart . . . I can hear Isabelle playing the piano – Chopin – see her slender fingers moving nimbly over the keyboard; I seek out her face, which I imagine tense with blissful concentration; but the image does not change, it remains fixed on the piano keys as the notes explode in a ballet of fireworks . . . My dog appears from behind a hill, eyebrows like circumflexes, a mournful expression. I reach out to stroke him; the gesture is absurd, yet I do it nonetheless. My fingers slip over the bedspread as over fur. I allow these memories to take possession of my breathing, my insomnia, my whole being. I see our shack again, on the side of a dirt track that is fading away . . . I am the child I once was. We do not have a second childhood – we never truly emerge from the first. Am I old? What is an old man but a child who has amassed time and flab? My mother is running down the little hill, her feet raising dust into a thousand constellations. Maman, my darling Maman . . . A mother is not merely a person, nor a unique being, nor even an epoch; a mother is a presence that neither time nor failing of memory can alter. I am the proof; every day God sends, every night when I crawl under the sheets, I know that she is here, that she has been here beside me through the years, the fruitless prayers, the unfulfilled promises, the unbearable absences, all this futility . . . Farther off, crouched by a mound of stones, a straw hat pushed down on his head, my father watches the breeze caress the slender stalks of wheat on the blade . . . then everything spins out of control: the fire raging through our fields, the kaid arriving in his barouche, the cart that brought us to a place where there was no room for my dog . . . Jenane Jato . . . the barber singing, Peg-Leg, El Moro, Ouari and his goldfinches . . . Germaine opening her arms wide as my uncle watched tenderly . . . then Río Salado, always, forever, Río Salado . . .

  I close my eyes to put an end to something, to put a stop to this story I have summoned a thousand times, and a thousand times revised. Eyelids are like secret doors; closed they tell us stories, open they look out on to ourselves. We are prisoners of our memories. Our eyes no longer belong to us . . . I look for Émilie in these endless reels of film but cannot find her. It is too late to go back to the cemetery and reclaim the dust of the rose petals; too late to go back to number 143 Rue des Frères-Julien, to become the sensible people who always make up in the end. I struggle through the crowds flooding the port of Oran in the summer of 1962; I see the terrified families on the quays sitting on what little luggage they managed to salvage, the children exhausted, sleeping on the ground, the steamships readying themselves to take the dispossessed into exile. I pan around, now a face, now a cry, an embrace, a fluttering handkerchief. I can see no sign of Émilie . . . And where am I in all this? I am simply a disembodied gaze moving over the crowd, moving between the blankness of absence and the nakedness of silence . . .