by Faïza Guène
The Other Side
The first step I take on Algerian soil is difficult, my body goes tense. I'm wearing a dress that spins and, since there is a little wind, I'm being careful to hold it. The sun in the bled shames my white legs that I never show.
The thing that comes back to me first is the odor, the scent of the earth, the hot air hitting your face. And always that letter missing on the sign: AéRO ORT ORAN-ES-SENIA.
The mustachioed customs officer nervously rifles through our bags, he turns over—in every way—the bags I spent hours organizing, and shoots me a little shady look. No doubt it's the word bakchich I read in his eyes. Not a chance. I'd rather die in this airport than feed the beast of corruption. So he continues his performance, he settles our papers and continues to watch us in the hope that one of us will take a magnificent bill out of our pockets. Best-case scenario, one in the right currency—euros—and worst-case, a stack of two hundred dinars cash. He makes us wait with unconcealed pleasure, searching as if the eighteen passages to the customs booths and automatic doors since Paris-Orly weren't enough. Determined to achieve his objective, he calls one of his co-workers over for a "verification." In reality, he makes a slight signal with his head and she understands right away. The good little woman comes over with a firm step, the mustache speaks into her ear—from what I see, they want to keep it on the DL. The woman has an enormous head that you'd think was screwed onto her bust. It's like she doesn't have a neck, she looks like the tortoise in the cartoon Big Turtle that used to run on Channel Five when we were little. She talks to me in a serious voice: she would like to know what the objects are that I have wrapped up in newspaper. I explain to Big Turtle that these are boxes of pills for my suffering grandmother. She wants to know more, so I tell her that she can open them if she wants. What does she think, this one? That I'm bringing ecstasy to my grandmother in the bled ? She feels the boxes through the paper, rudely munching her gum, then I see her stop at a piece of paper. She gets jammed up there for several minutes. It's the best, this one, she's in the middle of reading, as if that's all anyone had to do. We're still waiting ... But what the hell is she doing?
"What date is this? Is it today's horoscope?"
Then she returns to her post, looking dissatisfied. The predictions must not have been very good.
The Boss, knocked out by the heat, is even more out of it than usual. So he can make it through, I gave him a brochure on the security procedures that I stole from the plane. Foued seems straight-out lost. He looks everywhere, like a child loose in a shopping mall. The guy in uniform keeps insisting, then noticing that he can't manage to push us over the edge, he finishes by closing our bags and marking them with little white chalk crosses, which signifies that everything is okay. He grudgingly lets us leave, a little like a fisher would let a big salmon go. We take our bags and steer ourselves toward the exit. I catch him giving us one last dirty look, all the while twisting his mustache between his thumb and his index finger. I wonder what he's saying to himself, maybe: "These immigrants, what a bunch of cheapskates! With all that money they make in France..."
In front of the arrivals gate, people wait under the palm trees. The sun bangs against the windshields and bald skulls of the taxi drivers, who intercept travelers from every direction. They shout their destinations, the little villages they're going to pass through. Then the people climb up into the vehicle, throw their suitcases in the trunk themselves, and vroom, it makes a big American getaway.
We're waiting for our cousin Youssef. I'm not sure I'll recognize him, but he will recognize us for sure.
For the past few minutes, Foued is ready to follow every taxi driver who comes toward us calling The Boss "aâami," thinking he's the cousin we're waiting for. I explain to him that it's just a polite expression and that here all the guys who call each other khoyya aren't necessarily brothers. It's a little like the boys in the city and the way they call each other cousin.
Youssef finally arrives. The reunion is emotional but a little strange because, actually, none of us remember anything about the other at all. Anyway, it's no big thing. He's a man now, his worries have made him age earlier than expected, and except for the bit of an evil glint in his eye, the mischievous little kid I learned forbidden games with has disappeared. We get into the taxi and our cousin tries to make conversation with The Boss. He's having trouble but he keeps trying. I warned him, I explained everything to him so he wouldn't be too stunned at the difference. Besides, I warned them all that Papa was sick. They're used to it because of Uncle Kader, he's been like this too since he came back from the army—I wonder what they did to him over there. According to Aunt Hanan's letters, it must have been tough. He really bugged out. Apparently he pissed himself in the middle of the market and decided to get undressed in the street and started dancing around. Youssef asks us some questions, asks what we do, shows an interest in our lives. I tell him I'm working, but he seems disappointed when I explain exactly what I do for a job. As for Foued, he lies and says that he's going to school and that he works hard. He swallowed his saliva before lying: I can see we have the same technique. He avoided my eye while he was doing it. Maybe he was afraid that I would expose him, that I would shame him in front of a blédard, as he calls them.
"You still play boléta, Foued, like your sister wrote to me in her letter?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"Why don't you ever write us a letter?"
"Because I'm not so great at French."
"What about mine? It's worse than yours, but I write all the same. You're putting me on, little Franssaoui..."
That makes one point for the blédard, I'd say.
It's too hot around here, drops of sweat run down my forehead. The air is dry and the dust comes in through the lowered window and gets into the corners of my eyes. The taxi driver drives like a crazy freak and I'm going to spend two weeks with these people that I haven't seen in more than ten years and I don't know all that well.
The day before we left for Algeria I went to say goodbye to Auntie Mariatou. I told her some of my worries about the trip. I was really afraid of having nothing in common with my relatives, I was afraid that France has stamped me to the point of making me feel even more of a foreigner over there. So she gave me one of her succulent sayings, which I brought in my suitcases: "A wood plank can stay a hundred years in the river, but it will never be a cayman."
Just like I imagined, the entire village is on watch, a crowd is posted in front of the house. I don't know all these people expecting me, all these faces waiting for me, I wonder what I'll have to say to them. I feel lost like a fledgling bird who doesn't know where his nest is anymore.
The taxi parks in a cloud of dust and, on seeing the family house, Dar Mounia, something grips my heart. I'm short of breath, everything is moving too quickly for me. This is where I grew up, and the first sensation I have is that everything is small. My memory is right in front of me, only in a reduced version. We get out of the car and, while Foued and cousin Youssef take the suitcases out of the trunk, The Boss decides to make a real entrance. I don't know what came over him but he burst out of the car and set himself crying with joy, raising his arms, clapping and whistling. The craziest part is that the people picked up his vibe, it was like the audience at the beginning of an NTM concert in their glory days.
"Long live Algeria! The people of Algeria are free! We won! Algeria is ours! Istiqlal! Istiqlal!"
People are laughing, the children surround us. They cling to us, to our clothes and our arms. It's craziness. They start shouting:
"The immigrants! The immigrants! Where is Jacques Chirac?"
Then I recognize some familiar faces coming toward us. Aunts, uncles, and cousins throw themselves on us, hug us, embrace us with all their hearts. We are welcomed in a mad crazy euphoria, their shouts and youyous take us up, the village is in full celebration because a piece of France is paying them a visit. Then the ceremonial greetings, the "salaam" and the "labès," begin. I feel like
a week has passed between our arrival and the moment when we finally enter the house.
As time goes along more details come back to me. I redis covered my little secret corner. For me, all of Algeria could be found here. The fence through which I watched the passersby and invented stories for them had been replaced with a low stone wall. My beautiful orange tree has disappeared. Someone cut it down, replacing it with a water spigot and some huge ceramic sinks for doing laundry. Except for these things, Dar Mounia hasn't really changed.
My grandmother's grown old, she is sick. Having lost all her teeth, she can only eat soup and vegetable purée now. She spends her time sleeping because she gets tired too quickly. The poor woman is sweet for Foued. She has a particular affection for him because she was the one who rocked him as a baby, murmuring the traditional songs, and she was the one who chose his name too. The problem is that the little shit dodges her, because I think she frightens him: "She freaks me out with all the drawings on her face, and her mouth stinks too! She's like the killer in Saw!" He's talking about the tribal tattoos she wears on her forehead and chin. No one does them anymore, but in the old days it was a horrible test, it seems. In the village, there are some elders who used to be in charge of it, with heated needles, and apparently these elders weren't very fun, more like real hyenas. You could always try to escape, fight them off, but no way, they held your face good and tight. Grandmother told me that when they wanted to do it to Mama while she was still a little girl, she ran into the forest to hide. She laughed when she told the story, opening her empty mouth wide.
My memory of Aunt Hanan was true enough. She's melodrama personified, she cries all the time, for anything and everything. When I see her eyebrows start to wriggle and her lips start to twist from top to bottom, I think: "Oh shit! There she goes, she's doing it again for us!" Fortunately she's never seen Titanic.
She talks to me a lot about the time when I lived there. She makes me look at old Polaroids, she even shows me the spot where I slept ... It's like she wanted to bring me all the little things I would have lost along the way. She tells me that France tore me from the arms of my country like a baby is ripped from its mother. There you have it, she says something and so it starts, the wiggling eyebrows and the trembling lips ... She has quite a few other magic formulas like this. Aunt Hanan, she could make a truck driver cry.
I spend my days listening to people, trying to remember who I come from. I have a hard time admitting it, but the truth is that my place is no longer here.
My young cousins have one word on their lips: marriage. They prepare their trousseaus, and at Foued's age they're already real women. Their lives are stitched into their straw rugs as surely as mine is engraved into the concrete of Ivry's buildings. In the afternoon, they let themselves fantasize about another life, far away and impossible, when they watch the Mexican soap opera, drenched in orange-blossom water, clumsily dubbed into Arabic—minus the slightly hot scenes, censored, because they can dream, but not too much all the same. This nonsense happens every day at one o'clock. So in the village at one o'clock, life stops. And after the viewing, it's time for the siesta.
It's exactly at this hour that poor Foued cracked.
"Shit it's dead here, I want to go outside—"
"But there's no one out there."
"What's with this bled where everyone sleeps?"
"It's too hot outside at this hour. You think you're in France, or what? If you go out now, you're going to fall down dry, you'll see. The sun is going to scald your skull."
The "cousins," the ones who live in France and are in the bled for vacations, talk about nothing but their new country. They talk about it like a close friend who sometimes reaches out to them, sometimes kicks them away. They relay the stories they hear, the accounts of those who have slipped through the mesh in the net, and they add some, never admitting their failures or their misery. They never tell their family in the bled that they work at night, that they wash dishes at nasty Chinese restaurants, and that they sleep in miserable little maids' rooms. They embellish everything because they're ashamed, but they still prefer all that over coming back forever.
Cousin Youssef, he'll never know France. He told me that half the population is at least twenty-five and, destitute, doesn't know what to do about its dreams.
I would like to tell them that over there, in France, it's not what they think, that through the distorting window that is the television, they know nothing real. The French channels they pirate to watch the TFI summer shows don't show them the truth. As the young people here say, the satellite dishes hooked on the buildings of Oran are the ears of the city, stretched toward the north, ready to hear it all. But these ears are clogged.
But I don't let myself tell them all that, I don't want to be taken for Madame Know-It-All. These people have known a civil war, hunger, and fear, and even if France isn't what they believe, it's not so bad there, because here it's maybe actually worse.
After the traditional diarrhea of the first days, Foued has managed to strike up a friendship with some of the little neighbors. The kids around here have already nicknamed him "the Migrant." Together they spend their days in the area, hanging out in front of the hanout. His new hellmates, they're bled kids, real resourceful guys, guys who sell plastic bags, peanuts, or cigarettes by the piece in the street, who are going to spend their days digging through the trash in search of an eventual miracle or a pair of shoes. Even if we don't stay here long, I hope that Foued will see that money, it's not so easy to get, that these kids who march their dirty, aching feet in counterfeit "Mike" shoes, and who are beaten by adults all day long, including by their parents in the evening when they haven't earned enough dinars, these kids, they suffer but they get by and don't often complain. I hope seeing life here is going to make him think.
Today we're going to the city, to the ocean, and then to the cemetery where Mama's buried, while the brothers Djamel and Aïssa drive The Boss to the marabout's house in the neighboring village to do what they call a ziara, a sort of disenchantment. The ritual is the same for curing insanity, for setting a curse, or for treating troubled children. We'll see what good it can do, anyway it can't make it any worse.
While everyone is getting ready, I plant myself under the olive tree in front of the house. I listen to Algeria, I smell its odor, and I write in my little spiral notebook to describe it all.
I even talk about the small wooden comb my aunts use to smooth out my hair. I talk about Isis, the brand that has the monopoly on laundry detergent here, and also shampoo, soap, dish soap, toothpaste, sanitary napkins...
I tell the story of the big party the first night that was organized in our honor, the sheep they fattened and then roasted on a spit, all these new heads I have to memorize in such a small amount of time.
I talk about my cousin Khadra who sticks to me all day and who never stops complimenting me on the Agnès B. cardigan I wear. She touches it, saying she would love to have one like it, that she looked all over the Oran boutiques, that she thinks it's soft, new ... She certainly hopes that I take it off and leave it with her, but it was a present from Linda and Nawel for my birthday. Cousin Khadra practices psychological pressure on me. Foued was the first to notice her little game and he hasn't stopped himself from warning me.
"That's some bullshit, I've never seen the like, it's a sweater yo, you'd think she'd never seen a sweater."
"It's not just a sweater. It's my Agnès B. sweater."
"Oh yeah ... So then the cuz, she knows that she can smell it."
In my notebook I don't forget to write down what makes Foued happy. His thing is to speak French in front of the cousins who don't understand it at all, the poor things, and to drive them especially crazy by teaching them a little slang. So then I hear Aunt Norah's little ones playing in the courtyard singing at the top of their lungs: "Fuck the po-po, fuck the po-po."
I talk about my cousin from Aïn Témouchent who asked for my hand after three days here. His name is Bilel, and
it's like he's the sex symbol in the village, a real G, as Foued says. He has blue eyes and that's his trademark around here. All the honeys in this bled want him for a husband just for his beautiful eyes. He comes to Dar Mounia every day to see me, he struts around, shows his stuff. He thinks he's impressing me but he forgets that I live in France, and that I just have to take the metro to see some blue eyes. If he keeps flossin', God is going to punish his arrogance, and one morning without knowing how, he will wake up with brown eyes. And they'll be the most common brown in the world. That will teach him.
They've even vaguely talked to me about marriages of convenience they would have for me. Guys offering unbelievable sums to marry a girl with a CIF, a French identity card, the bids go up to seven thousand euros. I wonder where they find all this dough, it's alarming to see what they're ready to pay to know the other side.
The sardine vendor passes in front of me on his moped. The noise of the motor distracts me. It sounds weak, he should train with Speed Pizza—there, if your order doesn't arrive in half an hour, the pizza is free, so they're mostly interested in moving it fast. It's funny how life unwinds in slow motion here. Even if we haven't been there for a long time, Paris and its restlessness seem far away already. I get the feeling that my little brother would like to be there, but I hope that he understands too that his life isn't here in the bled and that he'll calm down when he gets back, because his expulsions worry me more and more. I think about them nonstop, even here. I dwell on the Tonislav story in every sense, I realize every day that those fuckheads aborted my love story and didn't give a shit about lighting up this poor guy's straw dreams. And then they think they're going to take my little brother?
Finally we leave for the post office in the city. We enter a huge room, armored by rows of phone booths, smothered by a hellish brouhaha, flooded by a whirlpool of djellabas and haiks. I would like to just call Auntie Mariatou to reassure her and to get some news of her little ones. So we go to the VIP corner, reserved for international calls, and there I see the fate of those who are brought here to disappear, to serve their second sentence. Their expression is the same as the one worn by the brothers I cross early in the morning at Saint-Lazare station, the ones who are cold and who walk with lowered heads. Crammed around these booths, these guys, as French as Foued or me, hold their handsets nervously, and watch the meter with anxiety. Sometimes they want to buy just a little more time, they scratch the bottom of their pockets to put in one last coin—they always say it's the last one ... They call their mothers, their boys, maybe their girlfriends, they try to talk loud to cover the noise and I get the feeling that they actually try just to talk at all. I explain all this to Foued, he watches them and I think he's as overwhelmed as I am. When we get back into Uncle Mohamed's car, no one says a word. We stay quiet all the way to the cemetery.