Generosity

by Richard Powers

  Yes, the girl has her music lessons, her family seaside picnics, even her horse riding on holidays with cousins in Little Kabylia. Some days, the city still rises up like a dream of jumbled white from the azure Mediterranean. But destiny runs mostly backward, in Algiers. Birth rates soar and housing collapses. Corruption outpaces every industry; just walking down the street requires a payoff. Education starts to gutter, and as the girl enters second grade, the entire cobbledup system reaches the brink. The Islamic Salvation Front threatens to sweep into power. Then the Pouvoir cancels all elections.

  Real darkness settles in, a decade of it. Her mother instructs the girl and her brother never to sit next to each other on the bus or walk through the market together. Many of the nightly massacres occur in mountain villages, remote and unregistered. But murder-nameless, ecumenical-makes itself at home even in the capital, strolling downhill from the Casbah, spreading through the French quarter, wandering impudently all the way up to the grim joke of the Martyrs Monument.

  The killers are many and generous. They massacre for any reason, even on one another’s behalf. The Islamic Salvation Front, the Islamic Salvation Army, the Armed Islamic Group, the Islamic Armed Movement, the National Democratic Rally, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat: new charters by the week. Devout versus secular, traditionalist versus Western, Arab versus Kabyle Whole villages disappear under cover of dark. Neighbors kill neighbors over old scores, then trick out the corpse to make it look political. A corpse can be ordered for a handful of dinars.

  The elites flee the country for Casablanca, Tunis, or Marseilles. Thassa’s mother’s brother escapes to the vast minimum-security wastelands of the Parisian banlieue, where he finds a job with Public Assistance. He phones his Algiers kin with magical accounts of buying bread in a boulangerie without fear of retribution. The girl’s father’s sister gives up her prosperous dental clinic to become a groundskeeper in the Montreal botanical gardens. The girl’s own parents-the last cosmopolitan Algerians not on a boat somewhere-resolve to leave when the death toll reaches eighty thousand. Then they say ninety. Then one hundred. They’re still there when the deaths hit one thousand a week. They are the victims of congenital hope. They can’t break themselves of that old habit, faith. Not religious faith, which they long ago consigned to the realm of vicious myth. Faith in their friends and neighbors. Belief in the average human.

  The girl enters secondary school. Her world shrinks down to her classroom and her home. But the world of books opens to her, without borders. She, her brother, and her mother travel together to Dib’s Tlemcen, Yacine’s Bône, even Duras’s Saigon. The three of them perform amateur re-creations for her father’s entertainment. The crudest imaginary venue is a respite from Algiers.

  Her engineer father waits for humanity’s return to reason. He makes guarded, deniable appeals to his lecture classes, slipped in between load calculations and stress analysis. He cheers the amnesty programs and the gradual surrender of the guerrillas. He quietly champions the new elections. His innate optimism begins to pay off. He pictures the end of the endless war.

  Then the Kabyle singer Lounès Matoub is killed. The country spirals into new violence, and Thassa’s father suffers a conversion.

  He writes a letter to the editor of El Watan: real democracy demands official status for Berber. Tamazight must be taught in public schools. All the deaths of the last decade will mean nothing without a return of that first tongue.

  His stand is moderate enough, given recent years. But two weeks after the letter appears in print, students find Thassa’s father at his university desk, facedown on a pile of fluid dynamics exams, two holes the size of finches’ eyes high up in the back of his skull.

  Thassa’s mother collapses. She’s two months recovering. When she can function again, Zamra Amzwar packs and takes her two teenage children to her brother’s in Paris. She finds work in a community health clinic: light clerical. Just until. She’s still working there over a year later, when the gendarmes near Tizi Ouzou, back home, kill a nineteen-year-old named Guermouh Massinissa. During the ten days of riots that follow, mother and children tune in nightly to accounts relayed from Radio Algerienne as scores of protesting Kabyle teens are gunned down.

  Four months later, a doctor at the clinic notices Zamra Amzwar’s jaundice and discovers her distended gallbladder. A six-centimeter pancreatic tumor has already spread cells through every system in Thassa’s mother’s body. Seventeen weeks later she dies, listening to her daughter read aloud the news from Algiers.

  The Berber student fits all this into three pages of eerily idiomatic English. Her second journal assignment: why you might not want to grow up in my hometown. But still, she writes, it is so beautiful there. I wish you could see it, up close, from the harbor. It would fill your heart. So crazy with life, chez nous.

  True, then: both of Thassa Amzwar’s parents are dead. Dead of identity and too much hope. And the daughter is either on newly discovered antidepressants or so permanently traumatized she’s giddy. Her writing has that open confidence of a child who might still become an astronaut when she grows up. All her sounds ring, all colors shine. Crippling colonial inheritance, religious psychosis, nighttime raids: she’s swept along by the stream, marveling. Her words are naked. Her clauses sprout whatever comes just before wings.

  Stone’s hands shake as he inks up her assignment. He uses a green marker to highlight great phrases. (Never red, the pedagogical texts insist.) By the end, her paper is streaked over in ghostly emerald. Even my photocopy looks like a kelp farm.

  When he finishes, he tries to return to his delinquent work on Becoming You. These last two years he’s become an editing machine-tea in, grammar out. But now he can’t concentrate for more than a paragraph, he’s so keyed up about that evening’s class. After his fourth evasive visit in forty minutes to the Algerian Crisis Explained website, he decides that a walk might do him a world of good.

  The walk from Logan Square to the South Loop takes hours. He’s healthy, and the hike should be effortless. But he’s winded by Bucktown. On foot, Milwaukee Avenue is another country. He knows nothing about the place where he lives. By Wicker Park, he’s overheard six languages. And all the more recent ethnic groups supposedly live on the other side of town.

  Frederick P. Harmon devotes a whole chapter of Make Your Writing Come Alive to place. Stone has the topic on his syllabus, for mid-October. Place, Harmon says, is as much a protagonist as any character. But place is in danger, Harmon claims. Our sense of here is rapidly disappearing in the globalizing, virtual onslaught.

  By Greek Town, Russell decides that Frederick P. needs to get out more often.

  Stone has a mental map of the city’s neighborhoods, color-coded: do not enter unaccompanied, or after dark, or ever. He’s never come close to those spots of true underbelly, the pockets of no-man’s-land that even the police refuse to visit. He’s seen the projects from the expressway, high-rise concentrations of pain on par with any of the earth’s doomed places. But Chicago’s grimmest threats seem laughable, after Algiers.

  He’s never once feared for his life here. He’s always felt safe, that lazy delusion. Now, walking down Milwaukee, he sees armed youths waving their Scorpios from town-house windows. FIS and GIA spotters signal from the street corners. A rebel pipe bomb blows out the picture window of a used-record shop. The street fills with oily smoke. Black-hooded paramilitary ninjas on motorcycles sweep up and down Division Street, commandos working for God knows whom, pulling random people out of cars and beating them senseless in hidden warehouse interrogation chambers on the edge of Oak Park.

  By the time Russell reaches the Mesquakie lobby, he’s quivering. All the bitchy, nail-biting, tattooed, fashionably depressive art students that so terrified him last week now seem like guardian angels. He wants to hug these harmless ingenues, gods of health and childlike benevolence. Meeting his group again is like the summer’s last poolside party.

  The Americans read their entries aloud. In a vo
ice so self-effacing it’s almost mute, Invisiboy Kiyoshi Sims describes getting paid to stay up all night on Provigil and exercise online wizard and warrior characters for busy professionals in his Geneva neighborhood. The Joker Tovar inducts them all into the perils of Wilmette: “My mother was once busted on Christmas Eve for letting more than half of her sidewalk luminaria candles blow out.”

  Then Thassa. She reads her words like she’s just discovered them. Her voice brings Algiers-dry, white, and merciless-into the fluorescent classroom. She reads about herself as a young girl, pausing her game of kickball under the back-alley clotheslines to watch three men put a fourth into the trunk of a beige Peugeot. She recounts her father’s death, almost poetry. When she gets to her mother’s “wistful sickness,” she stops for a long time. Her face is flushed and her eyes run, but she lifts her head and looks around the room gamely. No American can meet her gaze.

  She returns to her words and finishes, back in that sunlit upland where she started. Algiers is once again a stack of sugar cubes rising from the Mediterranean. Maybe it’s distance or time, American sanctuary, or a refugee’s anesthesia, but she’s good, everything that happened to her family is good, as are all things still to come. She radiates awe at ever having survived adolescence. Her brows relax and her eyes spark, ready for any scenario life might bring.

  “What do you think?” she asks her peers. She shakes her head at the standing brutality of her birthright. “Can you imagine such a mad place?”

  Princess Heavy Hullinger breaks the silence. “Could I see that for one second?” She snatches the pages out of the smiling woman’s hands. Studying Thassa’s sentences, Charlotte shakes her head and chants, “Damn, damn, damn.”

  The others melt into questions. Thassa answers with more stories. She tells them about the Islamists’ futile attempts to save the faithful from exposure to Southern European reality television. She describes her family running the finger of her father’s corpse over the fingerprint reader of his computer, to unlock the machine again after his death. She tells about her brother Mohand’s ill-fated turn as Cheb Tony in a Raï adaptation of West Side Story.

  She laughs as she talks, as if she hadn’t just treated them all to a misery that would have broken saints. A few more anecdotes and she hooks even Spock Thornell. They all chatter at once, competing for Miss Generosity’s nod. Before Teacherman can pay lip service to the evening’s reading assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive, their two shared hours end.

  But no one quite wants to leave. They’re addicted to the woman’s elation. Charlotte-Princess Heavy-takes charge. “Okay, people: we’re going to the Beanery right now and continue this.” She points a threatening finger at Russell: “All of us.”

  And so Russell Stone rolls down Roosevelt with a pack of art students on their way to a coffee shop on a warm September night. He takes up the rear with an embarrassed Kiyoshi Sims, toward whom Thassa, from her circle of admirers, keeps turning and shooting warm looks. It thrills Russell: she could have any one of them, and she likes the geek.

  The front ranks luxuriate down the vacated street, as thick and slow as the moment’s pleasure, hanging on each other’s shoulders, pulling at each other’s arms, loud and here and full of eyes, under the best of the city’s light shows, laughing and strolling, tuned to one another, embracing the spectacle of night all around them and feeding on the Algerian girl’s standing enchantment. Rising together on a heart-how can I say it?-too soon made glad.

  Years ago, on a night much warmer, Stone walked with his own glad pack, equally free. I picture his band wandering with this same slow sweep, through the streets of Tucson’s vanished Presidio, under a desert sky that between them, they owned. They sauntered together, the week before thesis deposit, on their way to their shared inheritance, planning the history of their unstoppable literary gang. Theirs was one of those great movie plots, where a handful of specialists come together to pull off an impossible caper: the classicist, the prince of the streets, the brainy one, the buckshot comic, the lyric queen of dialogue. They would change the way that writing worked, break the tyranny of convention, and reenchant the tired reading public with a runaway playfulness that not even the dead could resist.

  Six months later, their movement collapsed. Ground down by realism, the gang scattered. Two of them bailed into office jobs. One became a dedicated drunk. One of them builds houses up in the Pacific Northwest and claims to be writing a three-hundred-thousand-word novel, one hundred words a week. Only one of them-Russell’s Grace-proved merciless and mean enough for real creativity.

  And one of that once invulnerable group can no longer even imagine his byline on any printed piece without succumbing to a profound death wish. That one tags along tonight on the streets of Chicago, ten steps behind another invincible pack, this one in orbit around a woman who might have walked out of a story he once dreamed of writing.

  Has he ever fallen in love with a fictional character? I might as well ask: Is the man alive? He’s just a few genes away from those famous rhesus monkeys, clinging to their terry-cloth mothers as if life depended on it. The trait has all kinds of value: the ability to get warm from the mere symbol of smoke.

  But which fictional loves? Okay: an early, inchoate lust for Jo March. He burned with the need to befriend Emma Woodhouse, to pass her funny notes in the mind’s eternal freshman biology class. With Dorothea Brooke, he took long rambles through the countryside, camping out with her under the stars and never touching anything but her lips. Much later, Odette was great fun, until she wasn’t. He tried to protect Daisy Miller, and failed miserably. He tried to desire Daisy Buchanan, but failed to do much more than shake her till she whimpered.

  Emma Bovary scared the crap out of him, and he blanched in the corner with illicit craving every time they were in the same room. His time with Anna Arkadyevna was full of insane letters and rash, stolen meetings; she came to him in full sun, standing up, to excess, and right at the perfect moment in his own too-prosaic life. Lily Bart appalled him on two continents, but by the end, he would have done anything for her, had she but asked. Like the authors of the world canon, Russell Stone had a disproportionate fondness for pretty suicides.

  There were scores of others: blind dates, admirations from afar, one-night stands, happy domesticities ending in no-fault divorces. He fell madly, licentiously, guiltily, and often, always without sense or purpose. And each time out, the woman on the page reduced all actual women to pale, insufficient reminders of the full-throated real.

  But here’s the thing about this man: a few months after he read any book, its plot twists faded into fuzzy sepia and he could deny, bald-faced, even to himself, that any leading woman had ever had his whole soul under her pretty thumb. That, too, seems to be an endlessly useful and preserved trait: the ability to revise at will.

  “All writing is rewriting,” he tells the class, three times in the next two sessions.

  They stare at him as if he’s speaking Russian.

  Russell Stone used to watch three hours of tube a night, all he was good for after a day of repairing other people’s words. He’d lie in bed marveling at the perfection of nightly network fiction, the best writing by committee since the King James Bible. He expected to hate the shows, all the proliferating private traumas and tiny triumphs. But they sucker punched him every time. Five minutes to the hour, his throat would seize and his chest heave, and by the denouement, he’d be wrung out yet again by one more perfectly timed self-acceptance or reconciliation, one more flawed human managing to be, for a few seconds, something better than he was. And in between episodes, Russell found himself yearning to be with all his old fictional friends again.

  These nights he has no time for any fiction. He has a project, his first since collecting every mention of Grace Cozma in print. Whatever hours remain, after his two jobs, he invests in a crash course on the Maghreb. He searches through online Berber manifestos: twenty-five million people scattered over a dozen countries, and until this month,
he’s never heard of them.

  “Careful saying Berber,” Thassa teases him, the sixth night of class. “Berber means barbarian. Say Amazigh. That means free people.”

  With a single-volume French-English dictionary near his keyboard, he puzzles his way through Le Matin and El Watan-old newspaper accounts of the escalating violence that drags Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s illicit government down into places too dark for primetime fiction.

  Late into the nights when he doesn’t teach, Russell descends that spiral. He takes strange comfort, sitting at his maple writing desk under the knockoff Milton Avery seashore, in confirming the worst about Thassa Amzwar’s country. He jots down notes, as if to quiz the girl on Algeria’s grimmest particulars. Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse. And Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.

  He writes in his journal: She takes intense pleasure in autumn. Simply writing that makes him feel like Homeland Security.

  When the weather turns foul, her pleasure just swells. She comes to class in a chill downpour, her smock and slacks soaked, her chocolate hair hanging in strings on her shoulders. She stands in the doorway, he writes, laughing like she’s just been to Disneyland. “It’s ridiculous out there! Fantastic!”

  She tells the class about last night’s party-three hours of tea and cookies with five strangers including her UPS man and a Ukrainian woman who camps out at Thassa’s bus stop and speaks no English. “Nice people, Chicago people. So friendly.”