The Angels Die

by Yasmina Khadra

  According to a marabout, when Zane finally gave up the ghost, with his sins intact, he wouldn’t go to either heaven or hell because the good Lord would deny he’d ever created him.

  For the first few weeks, the Daho brothers would come by and remind me that they had a debt to settle with me. They would stand at the corner of the alley to avoid confronting my formidable employer and yell challenges at me as if casting a spell. They would make obscene gestures and mime cutting my throat. I kept calm, sitting on the steps in front of the shop … In the evening, my uncle Mekki would come to fetch me, carrying a nail-studded club over his shoulder.

  A jack of all trades gets to go everywhere. With all my deliveries and errands, I broadened my field of activities and before long made a number of new acquaintances. The first was Ramdane, a puny kid who was always in two places at once, having to provide for his large family because his father had lost both his legs. He had been thinking like a grown-up since he was barely out of his mother’s womb. I admired him, and even though I didn’t always share his opinions, I knew there was sense in them, and that quality – still there underneath it all, despite centuries of failure – which the old-timers called ‘dignity’. The boy had panache. Even though he was two years younger than me, I would have given anything to be his son. It was reassuring to know that he existed and that he brought a touch of loyalty to our collective defeat, which had reduced universal values to selfish needs and ancestral wisdom to an undignified survival strategy. Ramdane taught me how much more worthwhile it was to be useful than to be rich.

  Next, I met Gomri, an apprentice blacksmith as squat and solid as a bollard, a touch ridiculous in his apron, which was far too big for him. With his curly red hair, pockmarked face, clear eyes and skin as white as an albino’s, he made me uncomfortable at first because of an old tribal belief that redheads have evil intentions, which seep out of their hair. I was wrong. Gomri didn’t have an evil thought in his head and never tried to trick anybody. In between shoeing horses, he would show up and offer Zane hammers, hoes and other implements he had made himself. As the smithy was not far from the shop, Zane ordered me to go there and check there wasn’t anything fishy going on, because, in his opinion, Gomri was too young to produce such skilled work. I would watch Gomri take a piece of scrap iron, plunge it into the fire until it was red-hot, then place it on the anvil and beat it, and I would see the common metal gradually transformed, as if by magic, into an almost perfect tool.

  Ramdane introduced me to Sid Roho, a fifteen-year-old black boy nicknamed the Billy Goat ever since he had been caught behind a thicket with his trousers on the ground, abusing a hairless old nanny goat. According to malicious gossip, when the nanny goat had given birth, a delegation of jokers had gone to see him and asked him what name he planned to give his offspring. But Sid Roho never lost his temper over digs and jibes. He was funny and helpful and wouldn’t have hesitated to give the shirt off his back to someone in need, which didn’t stop him living off the proceeds of sin. He was an out-and-out thief. No matter how closely the merchants kept their eye on him, he always managed to filch what he wanted in a flash. He was a real magician. On several occasions, I saw him steal things from stalls, slip them into the hood of a passer-by and recover them on the way out of the market. I doubt there was ever anyone more light-fingered than him in the whole world.

  Ramdane, Gomri, Sid Roho and I became friends without even realising it. We had no obvious affinities, but we got along well. After a day’s work, we would meet up in the evening near an abandoned orchard to swap jokes and laugh at our disappointments until night caught up with us.

  At home, things seemed to be going well. My uncle had discovered that he had a gift for business and was managing quite nicely. He had made a cart from what was left of a wheelbarrow, stuck a cast-iron cooking pot on it and, from morning to evening, he would sell soup on the main square of Graba. My mother, my aunt and Nora all redoubled their efforts, supplying him as well as delivering fresh bread to cheap cafés. I didn’t feel inferior because of how hard they worked; as a result of my own job, I too was entitled to some respect and, before going to bed, to a prayer and a blessing. I felt grown up, almost as much of a man as my friend Ramdane, and could also afford to say, like the others and with some reason, that soon we would have colour in our cheeks and enough money to move to a real house with a door that locked and shutters on the windows, somewhere where the shops would be better stocked and there would be hammams on every street corner.

  I was tidying the shelves when a shadowy figure slipped in behind me and headed for the back room. I only had time to glimpse a white veil disappearing through the curtain. A smile of satisfaction glimmered on Zane’s face. He first checked the contents of his drawer, then, smoothing his moustache, indicated the front door out of the corner of his eye, meaning that he wanted me to keep watch.

  Zane had no more scruples than a hyena, but he dreaded the idea of his female conquests being followed by jealous husbands or family members with a keen sense of honour.

  ‘Don’t let anyone in, all right?’ he said. ‘Any beggars, just send them away. As for customers, ask them to come back later.’

  I nodded.

  Zane cleared his throat and joined his prey behind the curtain. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said in his overbearing voice. ‘You finally saw reason …’

  ‘My son and I have nothing left to eat,’ the woman said, stifling a sob.

  ‘Whose fault is that? I made you an offer and you rejected it.’

  ‘I’m a mother. I … I don’t sell myself to men.’

  I was sure I knew that voice.

  ‘So what are you doing in my shop? I thought you’d changed your mind, that you’d realised we’re sometimes forced to make concessions to get what we can’t afford …’

  Silence.

  The woman was sobbing softly.

  ‘In this life, it’s tit for tat,’ Zane said. ‘Don’t think you can make me feel sorry for you, pretending butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Either you pull up your dress or you go back where you came from.’

  Silence.

  ‘So, do you want my four soldi or not?’

  ‘My God, what will become of me afterwards?’

  ‘That’s your problem. Are you going to show me your pretty backside or not?’

  Weeping.

  ‘That’s better. Now turn round, sweetheart.’

  I heard Zane pin the woman up against the table. A terrible cry rang out, followed by loud, rapid creaking noises, covering the woman’s moans, until Zane’s triumphant groan put an end to the din.

  ‘You see?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so difficult … Come back whenever you like. Now get out!’

  ‘You promised me four soldi.’

  ‘Yes, two today, the rest next time.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Clear off, I said.’

  The curtain was raised and Zane threw the woman out. She collapsed on the ground on all fours. Looking up, she saw me standing there and her red face turned as white as a shroud. Choking with embarrassment, she quickly gathered up her veil and ran out as if she had seen the devil himself.

  It was our neighbour, the widow.

  That evening, as I was on my way home, she intercepted me at the corner of the street. She had aged twenty years in a few hours. Hair dishevelled, wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, she looked like a witch who had just emerged from a trance. She grabbed hold of my shoulders.

  ‘I beg you,’ she said, her toneless voice sounding like a dying breath, ‘don’t tell anyone what you saw.’

  I felt embarrassed and sorry for her at the same time. Her fingers were crushing me. I had to remove them one by one to get her off me.

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, earlier, in the shop.’

  ‘I don’t know what shop you’re talking about. Are you going to let me get home?’

  ‘I could kill myself,
my child. You don’t know how much I regret giving in to hunger. I’m not a loose woman. I didn’t think it would ever happen to me. But it happened. Nobody’s safe. That’s not an excuse, it’s the facts. Nobody is to know, you understand? I would die on the spot.’

  ‘I tell you I didn’t see anything.’

  She threw herself on me, kissed my head and my hands and got down on all fours to kiss my feet. I pushed her away and ran to our shack. As soon as I was far enough away, I turned and saw her huddled by a heap of scrap metal, weeping her eyes out.

  The next day, she had vanished.

  She had taken her son and nobody knew where she had gone.

  I never saw her again.

  I realised I had never even known her name, or her son’s.

  3

  The disappearance of the widow and her son had shocked me. I was angry with myself for having witnessed that willing rape that had plunged our neighbour into the depths of hopelessness. How could I rid myself of the memory of that desperate woman? Her voice continued to ring in my ears and my eyes were full of her distress. It made me feel disgusted with the whole human race.

  I was furious with those people who drifted from day to day as if tomorrow had no more interest than yesterday. I saw them pass through the shop, sick with hunger and despair, ready to lick the counter if there was a little sugar on it. They didn’t care about their appearance or their pride; all that mattered to them was a wretched mouthful of food. I tried to make excuses for them, and for myself, but in vain. In Zane’s shadow, I wallowed in bitterness and anger all day long; my sleep was filled with beggars, louts, thieves, fallen women, wild-haired witches and beaming tyrants whose mouths spat swirling flames. I would wake up dripping with sweat and as sick as a dog, run outside and throw up. I felt hatred for Zane. Had he ever been a child? If so, would I be like him when I grew up? Or would I be like one of those confused spectres who dragged their damnation around with them like a ball and chain, the dirt so thick on their skin you could have stuck a knife into it without hurting them? No, I told myself, Zane was never a child. He was born like that, with his twirled moustache and his sewer-like mouth. He was corruption in human form and stank like carrion in the sun, except that, horror of horrors, he was alive and well.

  Zane noticed how sad and distracted I was and threatened to fire me. I would have left of my own accord if he had paid me what he owed me.

  Worried by my low spirits, my friends plied me with questions, but I kept my secret to myself. How could I tell them what went on in the back room of the shop without being complicit in it? How could I explain the widow’s disappearance without being guilty?

  Zane fired me in the end and I felt a little better. He had been the cause of my depression. Nobody can live in close proximity to perversion without being soiled by it in one way or another. Zane’s actions hadn’t simply spattered me; I was infected by them.

  Even now, my silences are disturbed by the creaking of the table in the back room and the weeping of the women he sodomised to his heart’s content. I have enough mouths to feed without burdening myself with bastards, the loathsome Zane would tell them.

  My uncle almost fell over backwards when he heard I’d been dismissed. When he discovered that Zane hadn’t paid me a penny after months of slavery, he grabbed his nail-studded club and set off to have a word with him. He returned in a terrible state, lying on a cart, thoroughly beaten. This is your fault again! my mother yelled at me, sententiously.

  Left to my own devices once again, I joined Gomri in his smithy. His boss chased me away after a few days, claiming that my presence slowed down production. Then Ramdane suggested I give him a hand in the market. We were prepared to take on any task without worrying about how much it brought in as long as we were hired again the next day. Ramdane had no concept of rest, or how to choose between horrible jobs. At the end of the month, I threw in the towel, much preferring to loaf around in the fields or go to the souk to see Sid Roho cleverly robbing his victims. Sid was a wizard. Once, he even stole Laweto’s marmoset under everyone’s nose. Laweto was a curious old fellow who sold miracle potions at the entrance to the market. Whenever customers he’d fleeced brought back his poison, calling him a quack, he would come back at them with, What do you have against quacks? They’ve made more discoveries in medicine than scientists have. To draw his audience in, he would get his monkey to perform obscene acrobatic tricks that made us double up with laughter. That day, as he was trumpeting the far-fetched qualities of a scorpion’s sting that he was passing off as the thorn of an aphrodisiac plant, he noticed that his marmoset was no longer on his shoulder. In an instant, the scene descended into chaos. Laweto screamed and ran into the crowd, knocking people over, looking into baskets, under stalls, behind shacks, shouting at suspects and tearing his hair out in handfuls. Such was his agitation that even the thieves and pickpockets rallied round, suspending their activities to lend us a hand. But there was no trace of the marmoset. Laweto was sick with worry. He confessed through hot tears that he wouldn’t survive without his monkey and that he would die if it wasn’t brought back to him before nightfall.

  Night fell, and there was still no news of the marmoset.

  ‘Has anyone seen the Billy Goat?’ Gomri asked. As it happened, nobody had seen Sid Roho all day, either in the souk or during the search. Gomri was suspicious. He asked Ramdane and me to follow him, and we immediately set off for the Billy Goat’s place.

  Gomri was right: there was Sid Roho lying on what was left of a stretcher picked up from a rubbish dump, his heel resting on his knee, chewing on a stick of liquorice, like a young dignitary taking a cure, and … tied to a beam, Laweto’s monkey, scared to death, wondering what it was doing there with a crazy boy it didn’t know from Adam.

  ‘I knew it was you,’ Gomri cried, beside himself. ‘I thought you had some respect for poor Laweto.’

  ‘It was just for a laugh,’ Sid Roho said, completely unaware of the panic his theft had caused in Graba.

  ‘Laweto is about to have a heart attack,’ Ramdane protested. ‘Give him back his monkey straight away, or I swear I won’t talk to you again as long as I live.’

  The next day, with his marmoset on his shoulder, Laweto was roaming the streets like a sleepwalker, proclaiming a miracle and telling all and sundry that a winged angel had freed his monkey from a spell and brought it back in a dream.

  My young uncle was tired of seeing me come back in the evening without a penny. He found me a job as a moutcho in an ancient hammam in Kasdir, an old douar where night arrived faster than day. It was an Arab quarter grafted onto the southern part of Sidi Bel Abbès, with whitewashed houses and foul-smelling drains in the middle of the streets. The people were suspicious, mistrusting everything from Graba – child, animal, fruit or dust. I have no idea what Mekki did to persuade the owner to take me on. It was clean, honest work. I would carry the bathers’ towels, wring out their loincloths and scrub their children clean. As far as tips went, I could whistle for them, but I made seventeen douros a week, and that helped boost the family coffers. Everything went well until the evening a customer who was broke and couldn’t pay his bill accused me of robbing him.

  I was dismissed immediately.

  *

  I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell my uncle that I’d lost my job. During the day, I would hide in the scrub to avoid running into him. When the sun went down, I’d join my gang in the orchard. My friends knew about my bad luck and they all had suggestions for me. Sid Roho proposed I steal for him. He needed an accomplice to expand his business. I declined the offer. Categorically.

  ‘I don’t want to end up in prison,’ I said.

  ‘Some people get away with it.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s haram.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Turambo. It’s not having any money that’s haram. How do you think people survive around here? When you have nothing, it doesn’t matter what you turn your hand to.’

  ‘Nobody’s ever stolen an
ything in my family. My uncle would throw me out if he discovered I was stealing.’

  Sid Roho tapped his temple with his finger, but didn’t insist.

  Two days later, he came back to see me with a box slung over his shoulder.

  ‘So you want to earn your living by the honest sweat of your brow? All right. I’m going to teach you my old trade of shoeshine boy. There’s only money to be made from it in the city, in the European quarters. How would you like to come with me to Sidi Bel Abbès?’

  ‘Oh, no, not the city. We’d get lost.’