Even today, plugged into machines in my hospital room, as the erosion of the years slows my pulse, I watch the dusk steal the last light of day and I remember. All I can do is remember. I have the feeling that we never die completely until we have consumed all our memories, that death is the ultimate forgetting.
I’m already confusing names and faces. But other snapshots remain, as sharp as scratches.
Each man retains within him an indelible imprint of a sin that has marked him more than any other. He needs it. It is his way of balancing his being, of putting a little water in his Grail, without which he would take himself for a deity and no praise would satisfy his arrogance. Animals too remember their first prey. It is through it that they realise their instinct for survival. But unlike animals, it is through their first misdeed that men grasp their own insignificance. To raise themselves up a notch, they will look for excuses or attenuating circumstances and persist in trying to prove that they were right.
That’s how men are; God may have created them in His image, but didn’t specify which one.
On my bedside table lies the book by Edmond Bourg.
I found it in a flea market, among old things and knick-knacks no longer in use. Since then, it has become a sort of prayer book. It revealed many shadowy areas to me, illuminated them with a holy light, but didn’t succeed in making me keep the vows I made on that white morning as the police car took me to prison. I didn’t become an imam or a just man. I continued living without really being useful to others. Rather like my father when he came back from the war. Maybe The Miracle Man wasn’t written for me. Out of some morbid need or other, I had looked for a message in it, a sign, a way. After much dissecting of the sentences and brooding between the lines, I ended up seeing it simply as the story of a man who was a murderer, then a priest, a man I never managed to grasp fully. In Diar Rahma, where old men rejected by their offspring or consigned to the scrapheap waited for the end of their downward spiral, reading helped me to swallow my medicines and my tasteless soup without complaint. With time, prophecies become tiresome and you no longer have a desire for anything so troublesome. Oh, time – that lazy fugitive who runs after us like a stray dog which, just when you think you’ve tamed it, abandons us, depriving us of our bearings. Forgiveness, remorse and sin barely matter compared with a tooth falling out, and faith becomes as uncertain as a trembling hand. Sin is not merely a wrong, it is the proof that evil is inside us, that it’s organic, as necessary as anxiety or fever, since our worries are born out of what we lack, and our joys can only be evaluated in relation to our sorrows.
I closed the book, but didn’t get rid of it. I waited to disappear in my turn, like Sid Roho and all those I had lost touch with.
Then two miracles happened.
First the letter from Gino I received in prison a few weeks before my trial. Recognising his handwriting on the envelope, I felt faint. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t delirious. For some nights after that, I couldn’t sleep a wink, haunted by ghosts … Gino hadn’t written to me from the afterlife. He had survived the stabbing. I clasped the letter to me as if it were a talisman. Of course, I didn’t open it. I was illiterate and I had no desire for anyone else to read it for me. Later, much later, I learnt to read in prison. Once I could make out the meaning of the sentences without stumbling too much over the words, I took the letter out again and, although it was short, took ages to get through it: Gino forgave me; he apologised for having objected to Irène and held himself responsible for the mess that had ensued. He came to visit me several times in prison. I didn’t dare go to see him in the visiting room. I was afraid of disappointing him, fearful that I would have no response to his smile but a repentant expression, and no answer to his words but a helpless silence. But his letter never left me. I wrapped it in a piece of plastic and sewed it into the lining of my convict’s jacket. Today, it is tucked in the middle of my bedside book, The Miracle Man.
Then, on the day of my execution, my heart gave out, and they couldn’t revive me. The imam apparently said that they couldn’t execute a dead man. The warden didn’t know whether or not to cut the head off a condemned man who was in a coma … I came to in the military hospital, after weeks of blackness. My heart attack had caused considerable damage. For months, I was nothing but a vegetable. I had lost the use of my lower limbs and my left arm, that left arm whose hook had moved mountains; half my face no longer worked; I was incontinent – a noise, a cry, and my belly evacuated everything, wherever I was. I spent more than a year in hospital, in a wheelchair. In a state of shock. Locked into my lethargy. I was fed with a spoon, washed down with a hose, and was sometimes put in a straitjacket and isolated because of my anxiety attacks. At night, when the nurse lowered the sash window, I would raise my good hand to my neck and scream until they came and sedated me. I only vaguely remember those ‘parallel’ months, but from them I still keep a strange smell that clings to my nostrils like an animal breath; at moments, nightmarish images go through my mind and I catch myself shaking from head to foot. A photograph of the time shows me in my decrepit state: I look like a broken puppet on a pallet, saliva drooling from my mouth, my features melted, my eyes askew, an idiotic expression on my face. They tried experimental treatments on me, potions concocted by mad scientists; I would emerge from one delirium only to plunge back into another. A doctor declared me insane, unfit to be executed. That may have been what saved me – according to some sources, the Duke may have had something to do with it …
I wasn’t pardoned. I was sentenced to hard labour for life. No sooner was I back on my feet than I was sent back to prison. The guards were convinced I was faking it. They would set traps to catch me, harass me constantly, get other convicts to make my life impossible. Whenever one of my attacks came on, they would put me in solitary.
The months, the years finally returned me to the inexorable march of fate. I had again become a full-time convict. A filthy animal in a zoo of horrors. I found myself sparing the cockroaches after being accustomed to squashing them beneath my shoe; they had one advantage I didn’t have: they could go where they wanted without asking permission. The rats struck me as less repulsive than the smiles of the military police. Whenever a bird came and landed in the courtyard, I envied it with all my might, and I was jealous of the grain of sand that joined the storm and went travelling around while I remained stuck in my cage, rotting like carrion. At night, whenever some poor bastard howled in his sleep, you pitied him because he would be even less happy when he woke up. In that grim exile, the days wore mourning; no light reached us. In prison, you had no more respect for yourself than you had pity for the condemned man being dragged to the scaffold.
I extorted money from queers, beat up loudmouths, pledged allegiance to gang bosses and gave up my rations to those who were stronger than me.
There was no place for God in prison. Every reprieve had to be negotiated on the scales of survival. A misplaced look, a superfluous word, a moan louder than the others, and you were automatically buried, without distinction of colour or religion. You had to keep alert; the slightest careless mistake was paid for. I learnt to scheme, to betray, to stab in the back, not to look away when a cellmate was being raped and to look elsewhere when he was being bled dry. I wasn’t proud of myself and it didn’t matter. I told myself my turn would come, so there was no point in feeling sorry for the first served. I sometimes slept standing up to make the bastards think I was waiting for them, and when they came to rouse me with the tip of their boots, I played dead.
Prison was like a recurring nightmare. The hell of the sky trembled before the hell of men, and horned devils licked the boots of the guards, because nowhere on earth, neither on the battlefields nor in the arenas, did life and death know such contempt as the one in which they merged within the walls of a prison.
I was released in 1962, at a time when the jails were full to bursting with political prisoners. I was fifty-two years old.
When I came out of prison, I did
n’t recognise my towns or my villages; no faces looked familiar. Alarcon Ventabren had given up the ghost, his farm had fallen into disrepair, and the path that led to it had disappeared beneath the wild grass. All that remained of the Duke was a rambling fable that young gangsters spiced up to make themselves seem important. Oran was nothing like any of my memories. Rue du Général-Cérez had forgotten me. The old men shielded their eyes with their hands and looked me up and down. ‘It’s me, Turambo,’ I would say to them, shadow-boxing. They would step out of my way, wondering if I was in my right mind.
Strangers were living in my parents’ house. They informed me that after my father died, my mother had followed Mekki, who had chosen to settle near Ghardaïa where his in-laws lived. My search led me to a rudimentary graveyard. On a grave, a name half erased by sandstorms: Khammar Taos, died 13 April 1949. Judging by the state of the grave and the ugly, scrawny bush that had grown over it, nobody had visited the place in a long time.
I looked for my uncle but couldn’t find any trace of him.
It was as if the earth had swallowed him up.
Back to Oran. On Boulevard Mascara, the haberdasher’s was now a shop selling television sets and radios. Above the door was a sign saying Radiola. Upstairs, an Arab family were living in the Ramouns’ flat. Gino had left the country without leaving a forwarding address. During my imprisonment, he had married Louise, the Duke’s daughter, and run a large company making domestic appliances before a bomb attack reduced it to rubble. I never heard from him again. I myself had no fixed abode where I could be contacted. I wandered where the seasons took me, like a lost, faded, stunned spectre, incapable of situating myself in relation to people and things. There was fury in the gloom, and the burning sun couldn’t supplant the inferno of my country at war. Worn down to nothing, I hated myself for being no more than my misfortunes. The world that welcomed me was totally alien to me.
The history of a nation coming to painful birth was being written, putting mine aside. A history in which the miracles had nothing to do with me.
I had left my life behind me in prison; I was reborn to something I couldn’t care less about, too old to start again from scratch. With no bearings or convictions, I wasn’t capable of beginning all over again. I no longer had the strength. I had survived only to learn, to my cost, that a ruined life cannot be put right.
I didn’t find love again either. Did I look for it? I’m not sure. It wasn’t a man who had left prison after a quarter of a century of self-denial, it was a ghost; my heart only beat to give rhythm to its fears. At first, back in the world of the living, I would be reminded of Irène’s perfume by the smell of the woods. I would embrace a tree trunk and stand there in silence. In the world of the living, the dead are only entitled to prayers and silence. I didn’t dare dream of another woman after Irène. Nor did any woman want to stay with a wild-eyed convict who smelt of tragedy from miles away. My face told a story of expiation; my words reassured nobody; there was nothing in my gaze but the blackness of the dungeons and I could no longer smile without giving the impression that I wanted to bite … Yes, my brother, you who give no credit to anything but redemption, who question the facts and curse genius, who jeer at the virtuous and praise imposters, you who disfigure beauty so that horror might exult, who reduce your happiness to a vulgar need to cause harm and who spit on the light so that the world may return to darkness, yes, you, my twin in the shadows, do you know why we no longer embody anything but our old demons? It is because the angels have died of our wounds.
I looked for work in order not to die of starvation; I was a ragman, a nightwatchman, a caretaker of vacant property, an exorcist without a flock and without magic. I stole fruit from the markets and chickens from remote farms; I begged for charity and the leftovers of revellers, escaping the snares of the days as best I could. My fists, which had once deposed champions, were no longer much use for anything; I had cut off three fingers to make my jailers feel sorry for me – in prison, people thought of all kinds of nonsense that might give them back their freedom. What freedom? I had clamoured for mine, but, once released, I didn’t know what to do with it. I roamed from town to douar, sleeping under bridges. Strangely, I missed my cell; my fellow convicts seemed dearer to me than my lost family. The country had changed. My era was long gone.
I was arrested on military sites and subjected to brutal interrogations, was interned in a refuge for vagrants, then went back to being a tramp. A ragged drunk, I reeled through dubious neighbourhoods, yelling at the top of my voice, dribble on my chin and my eyes rolled upwards, and I fled blindly from boys who stoned me like a mangy old dog.
I learnt to live without the people I loved, roaming from waste grounds to town squares for decades, and when my legs could no longer carry me, when my eyes started confusing shapes and colours, when the slightest cold turned my eyes to winter, I gave up my bundle and the open road and, surrounded by my absent ones, let myself be tossed from one nursing home to another like a piece of flotsam blown about by contrary winds. In time, my absent ones left, one after the other. All that remained were a few vague memories to stave off my loneliness.
In my hospital room, night is getting ready to put my memory to sleep. It’s dark and the nurse forgets to switch on the light; I can’t get out of bed to put it on because of the tubes that hold me captive. In the next bed, a patient who’s nothing but skin and bone fiddles with his tape player. It’s a ritual with him. At the same hour, every day since his admission, he listens to the singing of Lounis Aït Menguellet, whose repertoire he knows by heart. The warm voice of the Kabyle singer takes me far back into the past to a time when Gino and I used to go to cafés-concerts in working-class areas.
I never went back to the streets of my youth; I never again approached a stadium; I didn’t see myself in any celebration and no victory made my soul quiver. Sometimes, passing a poster, I would stand there dreamily without knowing why, as if I could place the face, then I would go on my way, which never led to the same place; for me, the world was populated by strangers.
I was looking at a mirror and couldn’t see myself in it.
If we look closely at our lives, we realise that we are not the heroes of our own stories. However much we feel sorry for ourselves or enjoy a fame based on fleeting talent, there will always be someone better or worse off than us. Oh, if only we could put everything into perspective – affectation, honour, sensitivity, faith and self-denial, falsehood as well as truth – we would doubtless find satisfaction even in frugality and realise very soon to what extent humility preserves us from insanity; there is no worse madness than thinking the world revolves around us. Every failure proves to us that we don’t amount to much, but who wants to admit that? We take our dreams for challenges when they are nothing but chimeras, otherwise how to explain that in death as in birth we are poor and naked? According to logic, all that counts is what remains, but we are all destined to die one day, and what trace of us will survive in the dust of ages? The image we give of ourselves doesn’t make us genuine artists but genuine fakers. We think we know where we are going, what we want, what’s good for us and what isn’t, and we do what we can to ensure that what doesn’t work out isn’t our fault. Our feeble excuses become irrefutable arguments for hiding our faces, and we elevate our hypothetical certainties to absolute truths in order to carry on speculating, even though we’ve got it all wrong. Isn’t that the way we walk over our own bodies to coexist with what is beyond us? In the long run, what have we pursued our whole life through unsuccessfully, but ourselves?
But it’s over now.
My story ends in this dark room saved from hell only by the voice of Aït Menguellet. No friend by my bed, no woman at my side – maybe it’s better like this. This way, I can be sure of leaving nothing behind me.
At the age of ninety-three, what can we expect of the storm or its subsiding? I expect nothing, no redemption, no remission, no news, no reunions. I’ve drunk the cup to the dregs, suffered insults to the point
of agony; I consider that I’ve been paid all that was owed to me. My breathing has grown weak, my veins no longer bleed, my pains no longer hurt …
Let no one talk of miracles; what’s a miracle in a hospital room with no light? I’ve drawn a line under my joys and made peace with my sorrows: I’m good and ready. When memory weighs on the present, replacing the daylight being born at our window every morning, it must mean that the clock has decided that our time has come. We learn then to close our eyes on the few reflexes we still have and be alone with ourselves; in other words, with someone who becomes elusive to us as we accustom ourselves to his silences, then to his distances, until the big sleep takes us away from the chaos of all things.
The African Equation
Yasmina Khadra
translated by Howard Curtis
Through the eyes of a kidnapped westerner, literary giant Yasmina Khadra tells a gripping story of moral conflict, cultural awakening and lasting friendship in East Africa
Kurt Krausmann, a recently bereaved Frankfurt doctor, is persuaded to join his friend Hans on a humanitarian mission to the Comoros islands. On the way, misfortune strikes again: the boat is hijacked in the Gulf of Aden and the men are taken hostage. Held in a remote hideout, the prisoners suffer harsh conditions and the brutality of their guards; self-styled warriors, ex-army captains and even poets drawn to banditry through poverty or opportunism. When the group decamps to a lawless desert region and Hans is taken away, Kurt sinks deeper into despair. But fellow inmate Bruno attempts to show him another side to the wounded yet defiant continent he loves.
ISBN: 9781908313706
e-ISBN: 9781908313829
The Angels Die Page 34
