The Angels Die

by Yasmina Khadra

  I’d get to the main square of Sidi Bel Abbès early in the morning, my box slung over my shoulder and my brush openly displayed, watching out for someone clicking his fingers or nodding his head, at which point I’d throw myself at their shoes and not let go of them until I could see my reflection in the leather. The kicks in the side that I received taught me the tricks of the trade; the customers’ anger made me more skilful; I took care not to go beyond the shoe itself, the one great sin of the profession, and when they threw me a coin, I’d catch it and pocket it, already imagining myself on my balcony waving to friends in the street.

  Alas, there weren’t that many customers. There were days when I returned home empty-handed, with nothing in my belly. Not all Europeans were eager for my services: many wore shoes as worn-out as mine. That didn’t discourage me. I prowled endlessly around the cafés, the church, the town hall – and the brothel, because, according to Sid Roho, some boys about to lose their virginity were anxious to look presentable for their sexual baptism. My box seemed to grow heavier every day, but didn’t slow me down. Years later, I could still feel the straps of that box digging into the back of my neck and the slap an outraged client gave me. I clearly remember that particular man, who almost lynched me because of an unfortunate mark on his sock. Huge, his face crimson with sun, he wore a colonial helmet, a spotlessly white suit and a fob watch on his waistcoat. He was coming out of the barber’s when he hailed me. As I set to work putting a shine back in his shoes, he began ogling a girl who was hanging out washing on a balcony. I don’t know how my brush slipped. The man almost fainted when he saw his soiled sock. His big, bear-like hand came down on my cheek with such violence that I saw the night stars appear in broad daylight. It didn’t put me off. Blows were part of life; they were the price of perseverance, the price I had to pay in order to believe and to dream. And I believed and dreamt so much, my head was almost bursting. I told myself that what was allowed to some was allowed to all, and that although there might be people who gave up, there was no reason for me to do so. According to an old saying, the man who hopes is worth more than the man who waits, and the man who waits is less to be pitied than the man who gives up. My ambition was as great as my hunger and as raw as my nakedness. I wanted one day to wear nice clean clothes and braces over my shirt, to soap my body until it vanished beneath the suds, to comb my hair and live it up on the streets … Between customers, I would sit on the pavement and imagine myself coming out of a pastry shop arms laden with cakes, or leaving a butcher’s with thick slabs of meat in a nice parcel, or sitting on a bench, smoking my cigarette like that gentleman over there studying his newspaper. When a bus passed, I saw myself inside it, just behind the driver, watching his every move because – who knows? – I too might find myself behind a wheel one day. When a young couple came along arm in arm, I would feel a frail, tender hand taking me by the waist … I would hear Sid Roho’s grandfather whisper to me, ‘What’s difficult is not necessarily impossible … What’s difficult is not necessarily impossible … not necessarily impossible … possible, possible, possible,’ and I would nod with conviction as if the old man was right there in front of me.

  4

  Dreams are a poor man’s guardian, and his destruction. They take us by the hand, walk us through a thousand promises, then leave us whenever they want. Dreams are clever; dreams understand psychology: they accept our feelings just as we take an inveterate liar at his word, but when we entrust our hearts and minds to them, they give us the slip just when things are going badly, and we find ourselves with a void in our head and a hole in our chest – all we have left is eyes to weep.

  What can I say of my own dream? Like all dreams, it was captivating. It cradled my soul with such tenderness that I would have preferred it to my mother with my eyes closed. And my eyes were indeed closed, because I saw things only through my dream. But a dream isn’t brave and doesn’t think things through. It runs away when the hour of reckoning arrives; its principles crumble, and we come back down to earth as stupid as we were before we flew up to the sky, with, in addition, the annoyance of returning to square one and finding it even more unbearable than before. All at once, dusk seems like the smothering of our illusions, and the colour of night recalls the ashes of our vain passions, because none of our so-called wishes have been granted.

  My mother used to say that the gods are only great because we see them from below. That is true of dreams too. Lifting my head from the shoes I was polishing, I would realise how small I was. My brush wasn’t a magic lamp, and no genie would choose a worn shoe to hide in. After six months of hard graft, I still didn’t have enough to buy myself a pair of trousers; the stone-houses-with-numbers-on-streets-with-names were receding like ships leaving for the land of plenty, while I was falling to pieces on my desert island with nothing but sand filtering through my fingers. Even if my fingers were green, had anyone ever seen flowers grow on sand dunes?

  All it took was a little boy pointing at me for my dream to burst like an abscess. I was getting ready to have a bite to eat under a tree, sitting on my box, when I heard, ‘That’s him, officer!’ He was a European kid, dressed like a prince, the summer in his hair and the sea in his eyes. I had never seen him before and didn’t know what he wanted with me. But misfortune can never rest. It waits for you – then, tired of hanging about, comes looking for you. The policeman didn’t waste any time. His truncheon came down instinctively on my head. An Arab is guilty by nature. If you don’t know what he’s actually guilty of, there’s no point asking him. I had no idea what the little Roumi was accusing me of. I don’t suppose there was any point asking him either. My piece of bread stuck in my throat; the blood that spurted in my mouth didn’t help it go down. The policeman hit me several times with his truncheon and kicked me in the side. ‘You vermin!’ he cried. ‘You lousy piece of filth! Get a move on! Go back to your kennel and stay there. If I catch you prowling around this area again, I’ll put you in a cell until the rats have finished gnawing your bones.’

  Dazed, my legs like jelly and my face split open, I set off at a run and left the city, forgetting my shoeshine box, my stupid daydreams and a whole lot of other things that only a peasant my age would have been naive enough to think possible.

  I never set foot in Sidi Bel Abbès again.

  *

  Our stay in Graba continued.

  Two years had passed and we were still there. Mekki would take me to work with him in order to keep his eye on me. He had made a counter out of wooden boards and we would stand side by side, selling not only soup but also hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes with onion.

  I was seeing less of my friends now. We would meet in the same place, the abandoned orchard, but we were seldom all there at the same time; we would each take turns at skipping our evenings together.

  Ramdane had developed a nasty swelling in the middle of his stomach. The healer had assured him that it was because of the loads he was carrying all day long. Ramdane refused to take the healer’s recommendations seriously. He wrapped a bandage around his waist to contain his hernia and resumed work. He was wasting away before our eyes. As for Gomri, he had found himself a ‘fiancée’ and was starting to neglect us so that he could meet up with her behind the wooded hillocks. Sid Roho and I followed him one evening to see her for ourselves. The fiancée was a girl from Kasdir, either a runaway or an orphan, because in those days a girl had to be one or the other to be out at night and go around with boys. She had a long, thin face tightly wrapped in a scarf, narrow shoulders, a flat chest and disproportionately long and spindly legs. She looked like a grasshopper. She kept laughing for no reason. Gomri, his hands between his thighs as if struggling to hold back an urge to pee, couldn’t take his eyes off her, even for a moment. It has to be said, the girl was quite a tease, a hot flame straight from the fires of hell. She would squirm in simulated embarrassment, her fingers in her mouth, cooing, showing more and more of her undeveloped breasts and going so far as to pull her dress up above her thigh
s to get Gomri even more excited. Hidden in the bushes, we watched this little performance in perfect silence, Sid Roho massaging his rod and me thinking about Nora.

  The winter of 1925 was terrible. It hadn’t been so cold in the region in living memory. After the torrential rains that flooded our shacks, the ground was covered in ice, turning Graba into a skating rink. It snowed three days running, without stopping. People were up to their waists in the snow, and children stayed at home. Many straw huts had collapsed beneath the rain and some had burnt down because of the logs lit inside. For two weeks, the stalls remained closed and the market empty. Dozens died of hunger, dozens more of cold. When the snow melted, the place turned into a mud bath, causing more deaths and the collapse of homes. When the first provisions reached us, people went mad; Ramdane’s crippled father was trampled in the stampede.

  My family didn’t escape unscathed. Nora caught a bad cold and almost died. Then Mekki and my mother were sick for a whole week, throwing up even the rancid water they drank, which was the only thing we could put in our mouths anyway. As for me, I had a high fever and my body was covered in boils. At night, I had visions of cockroaches crawling around me. Then, one by one, we came back to life. All except Aunt Rokaya, whose knees had stiffened. She couldn’t bend her legs or sit properly. We thought she was going to die, and it was almost as if she had. Her lower limbs no longer responded. She lay on her mat, as stiff as a piece of wood. Seeing Nora and my mother drag her behind the thicket to help her relieve herself, I realised the full extent of human misery.

  Many families had gathered their meagre belongings and set off to some new hell. They no longer had a roof over their heads and didn’t see any hope of rebuilding their lives in Graba. Ramdane was among those who left. He piled his mother and siblings onto a cart and went off to bury his father in his native douar. He would never return.

  Sid Roho mourned the loss of both his parents, carried off by hunger and illness. He made sure he said goodbye to me before leaving.

  ‘Sorry about your parents,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the survivors you should feel sorry for, Turambo. My parents’ act has finished and the curtain has come down. I’m the one still up on stage like an idiot, not knowing what to do with my grief.’

  ‘It is written,’ I said, unable to think what else to say.

  ‘Yes, but who by? My grandfather used to say that fate only strikes those who’ve tried everything and failed. If you have a broken arm, nothing can help you accept that. I don’t think my parents ever tried anything. They died because all they did was endure what they should have fought against.’

  ‘And where do you plan to go?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t care. When I’m tired of travelling, I’ll stop. The world is vast, and anyone who’s known Graba can go anywhere he wants, knowing the worst is always behind him.’

  I walked with him to the ‘Arab’ road and watched him limp off in search of his destiny, a bundle on his head and his shoeshine box over his shoulder.

  It was a dark, ugly morning and even the birds had stopped singing.

  In turn, Mekki admitted that the time had come for us to reinvent ourselves elsewhere. He gathered us together in our shack, whose sheet-metal roof had been demolished by the snow.

  ‘I think we have enough money to try our luck far from here,’ he said, emptying our savings onto a scarf. ‘There’s nothing for us in this dump any more anyway.’

  That was true. Half the ghetto had been devastated by the bad weather and the few vendors who had tried to cling on had given up one after the other, for lack of customers or supplies. The suppliers preferred to sell to Kasdir and run. The track leading to Graba was impassable and the paths were overrun by robbers. The most alarming thing of all was that epidemics were breaking out here and there. There was talk of typhoid and cholera. The deaths continued. The makeshift graveyard behind the military dumping ground bore witness to the extent of the disaster.

  ‘If you hadn’t already made up your mind, I’d have left of my own accord,’ my mother declared. ‘From the start, I’ve been telling myself you’d realise there was nothing for us here. But I suppose men are slower on the uptake than mules.’

  My mother’s anger astonished us. She had always concealed her sorrows, like a hen sitting on her eggs, and now here she was expressing her discontent without pulling her punches. Her unexpected outburst was proof that we had reached rock bottom.

  My mother shifted a pile of packages in a corner of the room, extracted a tightly bound cloth and untied it as we watched. A wonderfully carved solid gold kholkhal rolled across to our feet, with the head of a roaring lion at each end and calligraphic inscriptions of exceptional delicacy on the edges; a genuine work of art from a lost era when our women were all cherished sultanas.

  ‘Take it,’ she said to her brother.

  Mekki shook his head. ‘I have no right to touch it. This jewel belonged to your great-grandmother.’

  ‘She doesn’t need it any more.’

  ‘It belongs to you now.’

  ‘I’m hungry, and I can’t eat it.’

  ‘No, I can’t … It’s all we have left of our history.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. The only history is the present, and we’re dying. If it’s written that this jewel will stay in our family, it’ll come back to us … I’m sick of this shanty town. Find us somewhere to go where people are like people, so that we too can be what we were.’

  She seized Mekki’s hand, put the impressive jewel in his palm and closed his fingers over it. With that, she left the room and got down to work putting some kind of order in her belongings.

  I had often wondered what my mother really expected of life. I’m sure she expected nothing, any more than she expected something of death, except perhaps the relief at having finished with everything, absolutely everything, provided there was no heaven or hell afterwards.

  Mekki set off the next day in search of somewhere to go. He hadn’t decided on anywhere, but was planning to ask the advice of people he met on the road. Ten days went by without any news of the head of our family. We couldn’t digest the crop we brought back from the scrub and we couldn’t sleep. Whenever a man passed our shack, we prayed it was Mekki. But it wasn’t. The waiting was even more agonising when the sun went down and we started to fear the worst.

  One morning, Rokaya woke bathed in sweat, her eyes popping out of their sockets.

  ‘I had a bad dream, I shudder to think of it. I’m sure something has happened to Mekki.’

  ‘Since when have your dreams been premonitions?’ my mother said curtly.

  ‘What did you see?’ Nora asked Rokaya.

  Rokaya shifted painfully on her mat. ‘Even if Mekki went to the ends of the earth, he’d have been back by now.’

  ‘He’ll be back,’ my mother cut in. ‘He promised us a quiet place, and quiet places aren’t so easy to find.’

  ‘I have a bad feeling about this, Taos. My heart has turned to jelly. You shouldn’t have given him your bracelet. With all those scoundrels on the roads —’

  ‘Shut up! You’ll bring him bad luck.’

  ‘It may already have happened. Mekki may be dead by now. Your jewel has caused his downfall, and ours.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, you witch. God can’t do that to us. He has no right.’

  ‘God has every right, Taos. Why are you blaspheming?’

  My mother went out into the yard. She was furious and didn’t know what to reply.

  I had never before heard her raise her voice or show a lack of respect to her elder sister.

  Mekki did come back, exhausted but radiant. From a distance, I saw him waving to me enthusiastically and I realised our connection with Graba was coming to an end. We greeted Mekki like a gift from heaven. He begged us to let him eat first, then, having savoured our impatience, he announced that we were leaving for Oran. My mother remarked that Rokaya wouldn’t be able to stand such a journey in her state. Mekki reassured us: a haulier from Kasdir who
had a delivery to make in Oran had agreed to take us on his lorry for a few francs.

  We gathered together our knick-knacks and our utensils, our clothes and our prayers, and at dawn climbed into the back of the vehicle and closed our eyes in order not to see Graba recede into the distance; we were already elsewhere.

  Mekki had found us a place to live on the north side of Medina Jedida – a Muslim quarter the city council called the ‘Village Nègre’ – a stone outhouse inside a courtyard, with a balcony and shutters on the windows, located on the corner of Rue du Général-Cérez and Boulevard Andrieu, opposite an artillery barracks.

  The dwelling was spacious, consisting of two large connecting bedrooms, one of which looked out onto the street and the other onto a beaten-earth esplanade, and a narrow room for cooking; the toilets were in the courtyard, which we shared with the landlady, a Turkish widow, and a Kabyle family who ran a Moorish bath. We were very pleased with our new accommodation. Nora shed a few tears to bless the place.

  It took me a while to familiarise myself with city life: the straight pavements, the roads that might prove fatal to the distracted, the panic instilled in me by the cars with their blaring horns. But I was in seventh heaven. Our house had a door with a lock and a number above it. As far as I was concerned, it was the best I could have hoped for.

  My dreams were coming true.

  The first few days, I enjoyed leaning with one foot against the wall and staying like that for hours so that the residents would know I lived in that beautiful residence with glass in the windows; that seemed to me as important as the fact that we were no longer obliged to fetch water from springs miles away but could draw it from the well in the courtyard. And at night, from my balcony, I would gaze out at the Moorish houses adorned with street lights, at their white slanting façades, the mashrabiyas behind which shadows moved in the light of gas lamps and, on the esplanade, quiet now, passers-by strolling here and there, carrying lanterns like giant fireflies borne on the wind. Spray from the sea, which I had never before seen in my life, was carried from the harbour and dampened my face with thousands of cooling droplets. I would breathe in the air until my lungs almost burst and catch myself humming unknown tunes, as if they had long been buried deep in my subconscious and now my joy had freed them all at once and launched them into the sky.