by Kamel Daoud
I almost never wept for him, I just stopped looking at the sky the way I used to. Moreover, in later years, I didn’t even fight in the War of Liberation. I knew it was won in advance, from the moment when a member of my family was killed because someone felt lethargic from too much sun. As soon as I learned to read and write, everything became clear to me: I had my mother, while Meursault had lost his. He killed, but I knew it was really a way of committing suicide. Now, it’s true that I reached those conclusions before the scenery got shifted and the roles reversed. Before I realized how alike we were, he and I, imprisoned in the same cell, shut up out of sight in a place where bodies were nothing but costumes.
And so the story of this murder doesn’t begin with the famous sentence “Maman died today” but with words no one has ever heard, spoken by my brother Musa to my mother on that last day, right before he went out: “I’ll be home earlier than usual.” It was a day, as I recall, without. Remember what I told you about my world and its binary calendar: the days with rumors about my father, and the days without, which Musa dedicated to smoking, arguing with Mama, and looking at me like a piece of furniture requiring nourishment. In reality, as I now realize, I did what Musa had done; he’d replaced my father, and I replaced my brother. But wait, I’m lying to you about that, just as for a long time I lied to myself. The truth is that Independence only pushed people on both sides to switch roles. We were the ghosts in this country when the settlers were exploiting it and bestowing on it their church bells and cypress trees and swans. And today? Well, it’s just the opposite! They come back sometimes, holding their descendants’ hands on trips organized for pieds-noirs or for people affected by their parents’ nostalgia, trying to find a street or a house or a tree with initials carved in its trunk. I recently saw a group of French tourists standing in front of a tobacco shop at the airport. Like discreet, mute specters, they watched us — us Arabs — in silence, as if we were nothing but stones or dead trees. Nevertheless, that’s all over now. That’s what their silence said.
I maintain that when you’re investigating a crime, you must keep in mind its essential elements: Who’s the dead man? Who was he? I want you to make a note of my brother’s name, because he was the one who was killed in the first place and the one who’s still being killed to this day. I insist on that, because otherwise, we may as well part right here. You carry off your book, I’ll take up the body, and to each his way. The genealogy I’m talking about is pretty pathetic in any case! I’m the son of the guardian, uld el-assas, and the Arab’s brother. Here in Oran, you know, people are obsessed with origins. Uled el-bled, the real children of the city, of the country. Everyone wants to be this city’s only son, the first, the last, the oldest. The bastard’s anxiety — sounds like there’s some of that rattling around, don’t you think? Everyone tries to prove he was the first — him, his father, or his grandfather — to live here. All the others are foreigners, landless peasants ennobled en masse by Independence. I’ve always wondered why people like that poke about so anxiously in cemeteries. Yes, yes they do. Maybe it’s from fear, or from the scramble for property. The first people to have lived here? Confirmed skeptics or recent newcomers call them “the rats.” This is a city with its legs spread open toward the sea. Take a look at the port when you walk down toward the old neighborhoods in Sidi El Houari, over on the Calère des Espagnols side. It’s like an old whore, nostalgic and chatty. Sometimes I go down to the lush garden on the Promenade de Létang to have a solitary drink and rub shoulders with delinquents. Yes, down there, where you see that strange, dense vegetation, ficuses, conifers, aloes, not to mention palms and other deeply rooted trees, growing up toward the sky as well as down under the earth. Below there’s a vast labyrinth of Spanish and Turkish galleries, which I’ve been able to visit, even though they’re usually closed. I saw an astonishing spectacle down there: the roots of centuries-old trees, seen from the inside, so to speak, gigantic, twisting things, like giant, naked, suspended flowers. Go and visit that garden. I love the place, but sometimes when I’m there I detect the scent of a woman’s sex, a giant, worn-out one. Which goes a little way toward confirming my obscene vision: This city faces the sea with its legs apart, its thighs spread, from the bay to the high ground where that luxurious, fragrant garden is. It was conceived — or should I say inseminated, ha, ha! — by a general, General Létang, in 1847. You absolutely must go and see it — then you’ll understand why people here are dying to have famous ancestors. To escape from the evidence.
Have you noted it down? My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain “the Arab” forever. The last on the list, excluded from the inventory that Crusoe of yours made. Strange, isn’t it? For centuries, the settler increases his fortune, giving names to whatever he appropriates and taking them away from whatever makes him feel uncomfortable. If he calls my brother “the Arab,” it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around aimlessly. For your guidance, I’ll tell you that for years after Independence, Mama fought to be awarded a pension as the mother of a martyr. As you can imagine, she never got it, and why not, if you please? Because it was impossible to prove the Arab was a son — and a brother. Impossible to prove he existed, even though he was killed in public. Impossible to find and confirm a connection between Musa and Musa, between Musa and himself! How can you tell the world about that when you don’t know how to write books? Mama wore herself out for a while in the first few months after Independence, trying to gather signatures or witnesses, but in vain. Nothing was left of Musa, not even a corpse!
Musa, Musa, Musa … I like to repeat that name from time to time so it doesn’t disappear. I insist on that, and I want you to write it in big letters. Half a century after his birth and death, a man has just been given a name. I insist.
No, the first night I always pick up the tab. By the way, what’s your name?
II
Hello. Yes, quite a blue sky, it looks like a child’s coloring book. Or an answered prayer. I had a bad night. A night of anger. The kind of anger that takes you by the throat, tramples you, pesters you with the same questions, tortures you, tries to force you to make a confession or give up a name. When it’s over, you’re covered with bruises, like after an interrogation, and you feel like a traitor to boot.
Are you asking me if I want to continue? Yes, of course, at last I have a chance to get this story off my chest!
As a child, I was allowed to hear only one story at night, only one deceptively wonderful tale. It was the story of Musa, my murdered brother, who took a different form every time, according to my mother’s mood. In my memory, those nights are associated with rainy winters, with the dim light from the oil lamp in our hovel, and with Mama’s murmuring voice. Such nights didn’t come often, only when we were short on food, when it was too cold, and maybe, as I believe, when Mama felt even more like a widow than usual. Oh, stories die, you know, and I can’t exactly remember anything the poor woman told me, but she knew how to summon her remaining memories of her parents and her family’s tribe and what women talked about among themselves. Unlikely things, tales of hand-to-hand combat between Musa, the invisible giant, and the gaouri, the roumi, the big fat Frenchman, the obese thief of sweat and land. And so in our imagination, my brother Musa was commissioned to perform different tasks: repay a blow, avenge an insult, recover a piece of confiscated land, collect a paycheck. All of a sudden, this legendary Musa acquired a horse and a sword and the aura of a spirit come back from the dead to redress injustice. Ah well, you know how it goes. When he was alive, he already had a reputation as a quick-tempered man with a fondness for impromptu boxing matches. Most of Mama’s tales, however, concentrated on chronicling Musa’s last day, which was also, in a way, the first day of his immortality. Mama could narrate the events of that day in such staggering detail that it almost came to life. She wouldn’t describe a murder and a death, she’d evoke a fantastic transformation, one that turned a simple young man from the poorer quarters of A
lgiers into an invincible, long-awaited hero, a kind of savior. The versions would change. In some of them, Musa had left the house a little earlier, awakened by a prophetic dream or a terrifying voice that had pronounced his name. In others, he’d answered the call of some friends — uled el-huma, sons of the neighborhood — idle young men interested in skirts, cigarettes, and scars. An obscure discussion ensued and resulted in Musa’s death. I’m not sure: Mama had a thousand and one stories, and the truth meant little to me at that age. What was most important at those moments was my almost sensual closeness with Mama and our muffled reconciliation in the night to come. The next morning everything was back in its place, my mother in one world and me in another.
What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book? I don’t know what happened on that particular day, in that gruesome summer, between six o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, the hour of Musa’s death. There we are! Besides, after Musa was killed, nobody came around to question us. There was no serious investigation. I have a hard time remembering what I myself did that day. In the morning, the same neighborhood characters were awake and on the street. Down at one end, we had Tawi and his sons. Tawi was a heavyset fellow. Dragged his bad left leg, had a nagging cough, smoked a lot. And early each morning, it was his habit to step outside and pee on a wall, as blithely as you please. Everybody knew him, because his ritual was so unvarying that he served as a clock; the broken cadence of his footsteps and his cough were the first signs that the new day had arrived in our street. Farther up on the right, there was El-Hajj, alias the pilgrim — which he was by genealogy, not because he’d made the trip to Mecca; El-Hajj was just his real given name. He too was the silent type. His main occupations seemed to be striking his mother and eyeing his neighbors with a permanent air of defiance. On the near corner of the adjacent alley, the Moroccan had a café called El-Blidi. His sons were liars and petty thieves, capable of stealing all the fruit off every possible tree. They’d invented a game: They would throw matches into the sidewalk gutters where the wastewater ran and then follow the course of those matches. They never tired of doing that. I also remember an old woman, Taïbia, big, fat, childless, and very temperamental. Something unsettling and even a little voracious in the way she looked at us — us, other women’s offspring — made us giggle nervously. The city, with its thousand alleys, was like a huge geological animal, and we were a little collection of lice on its back.
So on that particular day, nothing unusual. Even Mama, who loved omens and was sensitive to spirits, failed to detect anything abnormal. A routine day, in short — women calling to one another, laundry hung out on the terraces, street vendors. No one could have heard a gunshot from so far away, a shot fired way downtown, on the beach. Not even at the devil’s hour, two o’clock on a summer afternoon — the siesta hour. So, Mr. Investigator, I repeat, nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it, and little by little, I concluded that there must be — among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still-vivid intuitions — there must be one version truer than the others. In our house in those days, there was something I’m not sure about, something I might call the smell of female rivalry floating in the air, rivalry between Mama and another woman. I never saw her, but Musa carried a trace of her in his voice, in his eyes, and in the way he had of violently rejecting Mama’s insinuations. So there was this harem tension, if I can call it that. Like a mute struggle between an exotic perfume and an overly familiar kitchen smell. In our neighborhood, all the women were “sisters.” A code of respect prevented the more interesting sorts of romance and reduced the game of seduction to wedding parties or mere glances exchanged while the women hung out the wash on the terraces. For young men of Musa’s age, I imagine the neighborhood “sisters” offered the prospect of practically incestuous and not particularly passionate marriages. Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of love without the inevitably of marriage. Those women often inspired violent passions and hateful rivalries, the sort of thing your writer alludes to a few times in his book. However, his version is unfair, because the unseen woman he mentions wasn’t Musa’s sister. One of his girlfriends, maybe. And there, I’ve always thought, is where the misunderstanding came from; what in fact was never anything other than a banal score-settling that got out of hand was elevated to a philosophical crime. Musa wanted to save the girl’s honor by teaching your hero a lesson, and he protected himself by shooting my brother down in cold blood on a beach. Men in the working-class neighborhoods of Algiers actually did have an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honor. Defend our women and their thighs! I tell myself that after losing their land, their wells, and their livestock, women were all our guys had left. This rather feudal explanation makes me smile too, but do me a favor and think about it. It’s not completely crazy. The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness. So — and I really think this sometimes — there were indeed some traces of a woman, a scent of jealousy, in Musa’s last days. Mama never spoke about it, but in our neighborhood, after the crime, I was often greeted as the heir of some recovered honor, though I could never figure out the reasons why, child that I was. Nevertheless, I knew it! I could feel it. By telling me so many implausible tales and outright lies, Mama eventually aroused my suspicions and put my intuitions in order. I reconstructed the whole thing. Musa’s frequent binges in that last period, the scent floating in the air, his proud smile when he ran into his friends, their overly serious, almost comical confabs, the way my brother had of playing with his knife and showing me his tattoos. Echedda fi Allah, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, under a drawing of a broken heart. That was the only book Musa wrote. Shorter than a last sigh, consisting of three sentences on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin. I remember his tattoos the way other people remember their first picture book. Other details? Oh, I don’t know, his overalls, his espadrilles, his prophet’s beard, and his big hands, which tried to hold on to our father’s ghost, and his involvement with a nameless, honorless woman. I’m not sure, Mr. Student Detective.
Ah! The mystery woman! Provided that she existed at all. I know only her first name; at least, I presume it was hers. My brother had spoken it in his sleep that night, the night before his death. Zubida. A sign? Maybe. In any case, the day Mama and I left the neighborhood forever — Mama had decided to get away from Algiers and the sea — I’m sure I saw a woman staring at us. A very intense stare. She was wearing a short skirt and tacky stockings, and it seems to me she’d done her hair like the movie stars in those days: Although she was quite obviously a brunette, her hair was dyed blond. “Zubida forever,” ha, ha! Maybe my brother had those words tattooed somewhere on his body as well, I don’t know for sure. But I am sure it was her that day. It was early in the morning. We were setting out, Mama and I, leaving the house for good, and there she was, holding a little red purse, staring at us from some distance away. I can still see her lips and her huge eyes, which seemed to be asking us for something. I’m almost certain it was her. At the time, I wanted it to be her and I decided it was, because that enhanced my brother’s demise somehow. I needed Musa to have had an excuse and a reason. Without realizing it, and years before I learned to read, I rejected the absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud. Well, then. I pulled Mama by her haik, so she didn’t see her. But she must surely have sensed something, because she made a horrible face and spat out a prodigiously vulgar insult. I turned around, but the woman had disappeared. And then we left. I remember the road to Hadjout, lined with fields whose crops weren’t destined for us, and the naked sun, and the other travelers on the dusty bus. The oil fum
es nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer.
So how come I’ve wound up in a city once again, Oran this time? Good question. Maybe it’s self-punishment. Look around a little, here in Oran or elsewhere. It’s as though people have a grudge against the city and they’ve come here to trash it and plunder it, like a kind of foreign country. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, they fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days, but they can’t leave it, because it’s the only possible escape to the sea and the farthest you can get from the desert. Make a note of that, it’s quite good, I think, ha, ha! An old song, a local favorite, has a line that goes, “Beer is Arab and whiskey’s Western.” Which is wrong, of course. I often amend it when I’m alone: The song is Oranian, the beer’s Arab, the whiskey’s European, the bartenders are Kabyles, the streets are French, the old porticos are Spanish … and I could go on. I’ve lived here for several decades now, and I like it fine. The sea’s down there, far away, crushed underfoot by the harbor. It won’t take anyone away from me and can never reach me.
I’m doing fine, see? It’s been years since I’ve seriously spoken my brother’s name, except in my head and in this bar. My countrymen have a habit of calling anybody they don’t know “Mohammed,” but the name I give everyone is “Musa.” That’s also our barman’s name, you can call him that, it’ll make him smile. It’s as important to give a dead man a name as it is to name a newborn infant. Yes, it’s very important. My brother’s name was Musa. On the last day of his life, I was seven years old, and so I don’t know any more about him than what I’ve told you. I can’t quite recall the name of our street in Algiers. All I remember is that Bab-el-Oued was the name of the neighborhood, and the market, and the cemetery. The rest has disappeared from my memory. Algiers still scares me, though. It has nothing to say to me and remembers neither me nor my family. And picture this: One summer, it was 1963, I think, right after Independence, I went back to Algiers, determined to conduct my own investigation. But I barely got out of the train station before I lost my resolve and turned back. It was hot, I felt ridiculous in the suit I was wearing, and everything was going so fast it made me dizzy, too fast for a villager used to the slow cycles of harvests and trees. I immediately turned back. My reason? It’s obvious, my young friend. I told myself that if I found our old house again, death would end up finding us, Mama and me. And so would the sea, and injustice. That’s pompous, and it sounds like a line that’s been rehearsed for a long time, but it’s also the truth.