by Faïza Guène
‘I know. I’ve thought about it so many times. But I couldn’t see a way. I kept reminding myself you didn’t want to see us again. Maman wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The way you left us. It was forever.’
‘Mourad, you were the little brother, but I always felt close to you. D’you remember?’
‘Yes, I felt the same way.’
I thought back to the pair of Stan Smiths that helped me get picked by the captain of the handball team, for the first time in my life.
Before that, I was invisible, always the last kid, staying on the bench while all my classmates heard their names being called out, one by one, to join a team.
There would only be me left, with my cheap tennis shoes, plus this other kid, who was morbidly obese. Aged 12, he weighed 95 kilos and just the idea of warm-up exercises gave him nosebleeds.
‘You’re not to blame. You were under Maman’s dictatorship. So were the other two.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that! But when you left, she collapsed…’
‘Yeah, yeah, panic attacks, high blood pressure… I know.’
Dounia doesn’t just think something, she has to say it out loud.
‘At first, I was fuming, I’m telling you. When I found out you’d turned up at my workplace, I was beside myself. They’ve got some nerve, I thought. All that time, when nobody bothered to find out how I was doing, and now I’ve got an important job in the town hall, they send Mourad. I was furious. I was convinced there was a motive. It didn’t occur to me there might be this sort of problem.’
‘A motive for what, Dounia? Did you think we were after holiday vouchers, or a float at the Nice carnival?’
‘Listen, Mourad… there’s no point stirring it all up. I’m sorry about Papa. I’m sad to hear this. But I need to think things over. I don’t know if I have the strength to forgive.’
I pictured Mina witnessing this conversation. She would be furious, her face bright red with smoke ushering from her ears and nostrils, like in one of those Japanese anime.
‘What!!!!’ she’d shriek. ‘To top it all, she’s the one who thinks she needs to find the strength to forgive us???’
‘Mourad, you were too young. You didn’t understand what was going on. First they wanted to marry me off, then they wanted me to quit my studies.’
‘I never heard anything about any marriage.’
‘I couldn’t stay and follow the path of mediocrity they’d mapped out for me. I know I must look selfish in your eyes, but the truth is I didn’t just leave with a man. I left because of Maman. Pleasing her meant becoming the perfect daughter for her, doing the housework, the dishes, accompanying her every year back to the bled. Naturally, she’d have carried on fattening me up with tajines and almond cakes until, one day, she finally found me a nice devoted little husband who wasn’t too picky when it came to appearances. But, deep down, she wanted me by her side forever, she wanted to turn me into a fat, depressed old maid.’
It’s crazy. Dounia and I share the same nightmares.
‘So what about the skinny guy with the enormous watch?’
‘That was my biggest mistake. He was married, but I didn’t know it at the time. It’s so strange talking about this with you now, when it all seems so long ago. I’ve started therapy recently with this terrific shrink, recommended by a friend. I see him twice a week. He’s awesome.’
I didn’t share my opinion on the subject. I loathe shrinks.
‘I’m in Paris at the moment as it happens. I have to see my publisher, because my book’s coming out in a few days. I’ve written an account of my personal journey. It’s called The Price of Freedom.’
I didn’t share my opinion about that either. Frankly, it’s obscene. It makes it sound like a hostage-freeing story. You’d think Dounia had spent four years in a cave in Afghanistan, or with the FARC in the Colombian jungle. And even then, Íngrid Betancourt still chose a plainer and more understated title for her book. If Maman finds out, let’s not even go there with the number of extra medicine boxes to add to her collection.
‘I’m a very active campaigner, as it happens, with my organisation. Our message is: Be who you want to be. Nobody else can decide your future. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.… Anyway, I’m doing fine, Mourad. I feel calm and serene these days. I’m forging ahead.’
As calm and serene as someone who needs to see a shrink twice a week?
‘You said you’re in Paris…?’
‘Yes, absolutely. I’m here to promote the book, you see, do some radio and newspaper interviews, including the morning show on Europe 1, plus the back page of Libé. Get that, the back cover of Libération, Mourad! So I can’t visit Papa right now. But I’ll be heading back to Nice in a few days.’
‘I’m in Paris too, that’s why…’
‘Aha!’
That Aha! again.
‘So how about we do lunch sometime?’
Dounia’s new life involves shrinks and doing lunch.
Aha!
Social Etiquette
Miloud and Liliane had fallen out.
Again.
There’d been a bunch of Liliane’s friends over at the apartment for a dinner party: architects, film-makers, policy-makers, artists and an erstwhile guest with a squint, whose job involved organising polo matches in Scotland, or something.
Mario, the butler, stood pinned against the wall, tending to our every wish. He rushed to serve the guests more wine, or water, or bread. Ever-stoical.
Miloud is usually happy to play the handsome toyboy with a tan. He casts sultry looks, in the belief this makes him look ‘deep’. When Liliane’s intellectual friends have a dig at somebody, he pretends to catch their drift by laughing loudest and seizing the opportunity to show off his new teeth.
On this particular evening, however, the man with the squint, the one who claimed to keep company with aristos and celebrities, wouldn’t pipe down. He’d just acquired a vintage British car on behalf of a super-wealthy Qatari, and was bragging about how he was making a killing, thanks to deals like that.
He was a fit-looking 50-something ultra free-market divorcee, with no kids and a serious work ethic about looking laid back. You’d almost have fallen for his relaxed and urbane persona, if the psoriasis visible inside his shirt collar hadn’t betrayed his pathological anxiety. Still, Liliane seemed entertained by his boring story.
‘Seriously, Lili!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re telling me you’ve never taken Milou to Dubai?’
‘It’s Miloud,’ snarled my cousin. ‘There’s a ‘d’ at the end. Milou is the name of Tintin’s small dog.’
The man with the squint laughed. He turned towards Liliane and said: ‘You know what they say about small dogs, Lili? They’re faithful. Or, at least they’re meant to be…’
Liliane smirked as she sipped her wine. Now it was Miloud’s turn to get hot under the collar. His blood was boiling. He was hopping mad.
‘Are you calling me a dog?’ he asked, standing up and lunging at the man with the squint. ‘Say it to my face – tell me I’m a dog, you bastard!’
‘It was a joke, for goodness’ sake, calm down!’
‘Look me in the eye and say it again, like a man!’
‘I’m looking you in the eye, for fuck’s sake!’
Liliane tried to smoothe things over. But I could tell that she’d never experienced anything as thrilling in her life. She was like a teenager.
‘You people are something else, you fly off the handle for nothing!’ the man added, adjusting his collar.
Throughout all of this, Mario the butler remained as immoveable as marble, like an Algerian bride.
I dragged Miloud outside.
He started talking in Arabic for the first time since I’d arrived in Paris. I realised that he wasn’t so well suited, after all, to being the foil of a rich divorcee with dreams of going under the surgeon’s knife.
‘He’s got no time for bargain basement Arabs like me! He despises me and everything I sta
nd for. If I was an emir’s son, he’d have smeared himself like a piece of shit under my big Qatari shoes. Plus, he knows I can’t travel to Dubai! I haven’t got my papers!’
As for the man with psoriasis, I remember wondering whether his racism was as convergent as his squint.
‘Yallah,’ said Miloud, ‘let’s split!’
To my great surprise, Miloud didn’t head for the garage when we left the building.
‘We’re taking the métro!’
It made me think of the film, My Fair Lady, in a French-Algerian version. With Miloud in the role of Audrey Hepburn.
Suddenly, his proletariat side was rising up again. He lit a cigarette before dispatching a gob of spit that landed plop in the middle of the pavement.
Miloud stayed quiet. He didn’t tell me where he was taking us. Meanwhile, I was discovering the joys of the Paris métro.
A boy in our carriage was using his mobile to film under the skirts of an old woman who had dozed off. And they call it a ‘smart’ phone? Presumaby, the idiot would post the video on social media and be rewarded with gazillions of Likes.
A little further along, a woman in her forties, dressed to impress, was adding the finishing touches to her make-up. She scowled as she applied her lipstick, and it made her temporarily ugly. I don’t know any woman who looks beautiful when she’s putting on her lipstick.
‘Chat her up!’ urged Miloud, reconnecting with his brand new smile. ‘You like her, right? Come on, you can’t take your eyes off her!’
‘Sorry, Miloud, older women aren’t my thing.’
‘Well, you’re into blondes, I’ve noticed!’
‘Not true! Or not especially. No more than brunettes.’
‘You’re weird, cuz. Apart from books, you’re not into anything! It’s like your mind is locked-off.’
‘I find everything I need in books.’
‘You won’t find the laughter of a beautiful girl, or a pair of legs, or the scent of her neck in your books!’
‘That’s where you’re mistaken – there’s everything! Look, you go to that Club Med gym where you pay an eye-watering subscription to beef up your biceps on state-of-the-art machines–’
‘You know I’m not the one paying, so who cares?’
‘That’s not the point, Miloud. What I’m trying to say is, for me, reading’s a workout, for my imagination and my emotions. If emotions were muscles, I’d be an athlete. Does that make sense?’
He stared hard at me for a moment.
‘No.’
I laughed.
‘Listen up, I’ve heard about some kinky shit going down when it comes to the toffs cuz. People getting turned on by shoes, or animals, or leotards or furniture. But I’ve never met someone who gets turned on by books.’
I laughed, level ten.
‘If it’s because you’re a pooftah, I promise not to say anything to your mum. Trust me, I’ve got this friend, Karim, who lives in Argenteuil and, every now and then, when the raï singers are over giving concerts in the Paris region, he provides them with a bit of company. Sometimes, they’re feeling alone in their hotel, they prefer to keep things discreet, a quick phone call to Karim, he hops in his car and heads over. That’s just his thing, I don’t judge him for it…’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? I’m like you, I love raï. Not raï singers.’
Miloud’s much funnier when he’s in the métro, away from the social etiquette of Liliane’s dinner table, laid for ten.
Le Saphir Bleu
I’d never set foot in a nightclub before. Let alone a dive-bar for raï music.
In the cobbled recess of a dimly-lit dead-end street, the rain beat down on us. This was the beginning of our night out, banlieue-style.
It felt like we were in some American detective movie.
Definitely not a French one.
French detective movies always start off in the police station, between nine and five, with an overweight detective who’s hoarse and in his sixties. In spite of his cholesterol problems, chomping on a sandwich that’s jambon-beurre-mayonnaise when a young and inexperienced cop knocks on the office door.
‘Superintendent!’ he bellows. ‘A prostitute’s body’s been found in the Seine!’
So the detective pulls on his raincoat and takes his sandwich with him, intending to finish it on the way. This is a French film, after all, and that sandwich cost €3.30, so he doesn’t want it going to waste. Displaying the kind of vim his chosen career demands, he climbs into an unmarked patrol car. Close-up on the Citroën logo. A tribute to ‘made in France’? The detective will lead the inquiry in the next episode.
He jumps every traffic light along the boulevard to reach the crime scene double-quick, in case the corpse returns to life. On the way, he remembers to call home to check his teenage son is back safely from school and doing his science assignment.
So that’s how it is in a French detective film, right? Just thought I’d point out the difference.
As we drew closer to the music, the flashing sign for Le Saphir Bleu was in sync with the bass line. Miloud pushed open the swing doors and fell into a long clammy hug with the bouncers.
‘Me and them, we’re like brothers!’
The two giants had such broad necks you could have drawn the map of the ex-USSR on them.
‘When I’m here, I feel like I’m on home turf,’ whispered Miloud, letting out a contented sigh.
‘Hou là là…’ exclaimed the pretty cloakroom attendant, recognising him. ‘H’mar mette!’
I love that expression. In Arabic, it’s literal meaning is: ‘A donkey has died.’
My mother uses it to signal her astonishment at very rare occurrences. For example, whenever my father started sorting the contents of his garage, she would say, ‘Yééé, are you tidying your souk? H’mar mette!’
I guess it must have something to do with a donkey’s long life expectancy. I once read something about it being at least a third longer than a horse’s.
Mademoiselle Cloakroom was called ‘Sousou’. A nickname, I was guessing. Miloud kissed her on both cheeks, then the neck. She pushed him away, giggling: ‘Buzz off of me!’ She had some colourful expressions.
She was reading a celebrity magazine and the girl’s face on the front cover looked vaguely familiar. Bam, I managed to situate her: aisle seat, 12C. ‘Shock!’ ran the headline: ‘Cindy comes out about her mother’s cancer!’ It was on the tip of my tongue to say ‘Hey, I know her!’
Inside, people were dancing with outstretched arms, glass in hand. They were laughing and singing as their bodies intertwined. The lighting effects made the club feel like a TV variety show from the eighties. I stood there, soaking up this unfamiliar spectacle.
Some of the men had undone their shirt buttons down to the fourth hole, while the cleavages of the dancing girls were heaving with ten euro notes.
A young DJ kept dedicating songs to absent friends: those who had stayed behind, back in Algeria. He gave shout-outs to families, districts, streets and villages. He seemed to be enjoying himself, to be moved even by these requests.
It occurred to me that, at exactly the same time, those absent friends might also be in a club where they were dedicating songs to their absent friends.
I thought of the expression, ‘it’s always the people who aren’t there that get the blame’.
As I watched all those people, I sensed different versions of loneliness. I figured everyone was there to forget something.
Miloud was trying to forget his obsession with that fly drowning in the cold cup of coffee. I was trying to banish the thought of a half-dead father and an octopus-mother who was as loving as she was overbearing.
And all the while, the raï kept flowing.
Deep in his cups, my cousin was holding forth about how American stars owed a big debt to the Algerians.
‘Because who d’you think introduced the vocoder into music, hey?’ he spluttered into his glass. ‘We did!’
So will Rihanna
thank Cheba Djenet for Matejebdoulich one day? It’s an unsolved mystery.
A small group had formed around two hench guys. One of them, in an over-sized fake-leather jacket, called the other one out for disrespecting him.
‘Sit on that, asshole!’ said the second, giving him the finger.
The guy in the fake-leather flew off his fake-handle, prompting Miloud’s two bouncer friends to heave their big necks over to the bar and extricate him without further ado.
‘Sami, stop drinking!’ they ordered. ‘You don’t know how to drink!’
I love that expression ‘without further ado’, by the way, just using it makes me feel happy.
Miloud carried on drinking. Are you supposed to know how to drink? Is there a right way of drinking? So many unanswered questions as I sipped on my fizzy pop. Strawberry-flavoured Ifri. A drink from the old country. A kind of sparkling diabetes.
When they started playing Cheb Hasni’s cult track, Mazal souvenir andi, my cousin burst into tears. As in, bawling his eyes out like a teenage girl after losing her virginity turned out to be a big letdown. He was inconsolable.
I randomly patted his shoulder, unsure what to do.
Opposite, I noticed a transvestite in a red wig staring at us. He smoked like a man and danced like a woman. If his knees had been less calloused, he would have possessed the perfect pair of legs.
He jerkily rearranged his long synthetic hair and tottered over to our table on his diamante heels.
‘Hey! Stop crying! Pull yourself together! You’re a man, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Look who’s talking!’
‘It’s different!’
‘I’m crying because it’s hard. This dog’s life of ours is so hard.’
