by Kamel Daoud
What were we talking about? Ah, yes, the days after the crime. Well, as I told you, I didn’t do anything, I slept while the people were devouring the incredible country that had been given back to them. Those were days without names or language; I saw people and trees differently, from an unexpected angle, over and above their usual designations; I returned to primordial feeling. For a brief while, I knew your hero’s genius: the ability to tear open the common, everyday language and emerge on the other side, where a more devastating language is waiting to narrate the world in another way. That’s it! The reason why your hero tells the story of my brother’s murder so well is that he’d reached a new territory, a language that was unknown and grew more powerful in his embrace, the words like pitilessly carved stones, a language as naked as Euclidian geometry. I think that’s the grand style, when all is said and done: to speak with the austere precision the last moments of your life impose on you. Imagine a dying man and the words he says. That’s your hero’s genius: He describes the world as if he’s going to die at any moment, as if he has to choose his words with an economy of breathing. He’s an ascetic.
Five days later, answering the summons I’d received from the country’s new leaders, I betook myself to the Hadjout town hall. There I was arrested and thrown into a room that already contained several people — a few Arabs (who doubtless hadn’t fought in the revolution or whom the revolution hadn’t killed), but mostly Frenchmen; I didn’t know any of them, not even by sight. Somebody asked me in French what I’d done. I answered that I was accused of having killed a Frenchman, and they were all silent. Night fell. Bugs tormented me in my sleep the whole night, but I was somewhat used to that. A sunbeam came through the skylight and woke me up. I heard noises in the corridors, footsteps, shouted orders. Nobody gave us any coffee. I waited. The French stared hard at the few Arabs, who scrutinized them in turn. Two djounoud eventually came in. When they thrust their chins in my direction, the guard grabbed me by the neck and pulled me outside. I was hustled into a jeep, and I figured I was being transferred to the police station, where they could put me in a cell by myself. The Algerian flag on the jeep flapped in the wind. Along the way, I saw my mother walking on the shoulder of the road, enveloped in her haik. She stopped to let the convoy pass. I smiled at her vaguely, but she remained stone-faced. I’m sure she followed us with her eyes before she started walking again. I was thrown into a cell, where I had a bucket for a toilet and a tin washbasin. The prison was situated in the center of town, and through a small window I could see some cypresses with whitewashed trunks. A guard came in and told me I had a visitor. I thought it must be my mother, and I was right.
I followed the taciturn guard the whole length of an endless corridor that led to a small room. Two djounoud were there, completely indifferent to us. They seemed weary, worn, and tense, with slightly crazy eyes, as if seeking the invisible enemy they’d spent years with the resistance on the lookout for. I turned to my mother; her face was closed but serene. She was sitting, straight-backed and dignified, on a wooden bench. The room we were in had two doors: the one I’d come through and another that opened into a second corridor. There I could see two little old French ladies. The first one was dressed all in black, and her lips were tightly closed. The second was a big woman with bushy hair who looked very nervous. I could also see into another room, most likely an office, with open folders, sheets of paper on the floor, and a broken windowpane. All was silent — a little too silent, in fact; it made it hard to find words. I didn’t know what to say. I speak very little to my mother, it’s been like that forever, and we weren’t used to having so many people around, hanging on our lips. Only one person had ever intruded on us, couple that we were, and I’d killed him. Here I had no weapon. Mama leaned toward me abruptly and I flinched hard, as if I might be struck in the face or devoured in one gulp. She spoke very fast: “I told him you were my only son and that was why you couldn’t join the resistance.” After a silent pause, she added: “I told them Musa died.” She was still talking about his death as if it had happened yesterday, or as if the date was a mere detail. She explained that she’d shown the colonel the two scraps of newspaper with the article about an Arab killed on a beach. The colonel had hesitated to believe her. No names were given, and there was nothing to prove she was really the mother of a martyr; and besides, could he even have been a martyr, since the crime dated from 1942? I told her, “It’s difficult to prove.” The fat Frenchwoman seemed to be following our discussion with tremendous concentration. I believe everyone was listening to us. Granted, there was nothing else to do. You could hear the birds outside, the sounds of engines, of trees reaching out to embrace in the wind, but none of that was very interesting. I had no idea what I could add. “I didn’t bawl like the other women. I think he believed me because of that,” she said in one urgent breath, as if murmuring a secret. However, I had already understood what she was really trying to tell me, and besides, the conversation was over.
I had the impression that everybody was waiting for an honorable exit, a sign, a snap of the fingers to wake them up, some way of closing the interview without looking ridiculous. I felt an immense weight on my shoulders. The meeting between a mother and an incarcerated son must end either in a tender embrace or in tears. And maybe one of us should have said something … But nothing was said, and the time seemed to drag on interminably. Then we heard the squealing of tires outside. My mother sprang nimbly to her feet. Out in the corridor, the old woman with the tight lips took the beginnings of a step. One of the soldiers came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder, the other coughed discreetly. The two Frenchwomen were staring at the end of the corridor, which I couldn’t see, I could just hear footsteps echoing down the hall. As they drew closer, I saw the two old women turn pale and shrink back with distorted faces, all the while shooting each other panicked looks. “It’s him, he speaks French,” the bigger of the two women said, pointing at me. Mama whispered, “The colonel believed me. When you get out, I’ll find you a wife.” Now there was a promise I wasn’t expecting. But I understood what she meant to say by it. Then I was brought back to my cell. Once inside, I sat down and looked out at the cypresses. All sorts of ideas were colliding in my head, but I felt calm, and I remembered Bab-el-Oued and our wanderings there, Mama’s and mine, our arrival here in this town, the light, the sky, the swans’ nests. In Hadjout I learned to hunt birds, but that ceased to amuse me as the years passed. Why didn’t I ever take up arms and join the resistance? Yes, that’s what you were obligated to do in those days, when you were young and you couldn’t go swimming. I was twenty-seven, and nobody in the village was able to understand why I hung around instead of going underground and joining “the brothers.” People in Hadjout had been making fun of me for a long time, ever since our arrival there. They thought I was sick or lacking male private parts or a prisoner of the woman who called herself my mother. When I was fifteen, I had to kill a dog with my own hands, using a blade fashioned from the lid of a sardine can, to make the boys of my age stop laughing at me and calling me a coward and a wimp. One day a man who was watching me play kickball in the street with some other kids suddenly called out, “Your legs don’t match.” At my mother’s insistence, I went to school, and very quickly I made enough progress to read her the fragments of newspapers she collected, with articles that told the story of how Musa had been killed but never gave his name, his neighborhood, his age, or even his initials. The truth is, we started the war — in a way — before the people did. Of course, I didn’t kill a Frenchman until July 1962, but our family had known death, martyrdom, exile, flight, hunger, grief, and pleas for justice at a time when the country’s war leaders were still playing marbles and lugging baskets in the markets in Algiers.
So at the age of twenty-seven, I was a sort of anomaly. And sooner or later, I’d have to answer for it before an officer in the Army of National Liberation. Meanwhile time passed in the sky I could see through the window, and it passed in the color of t
he trees, which became dark and murmurous. The guard brought me a meal and I thanked him, and then I thought it would be a great pleasure to sleep some more. I felt thoroughly free in my cell, without Mama or Musa. Before leaving me alone, the guard turned around and fired a question at me: “Why didn’t you help the brothers?” He said it without nastiness, with kindness even, and with a certain curiosity. I didn’t collaborate with the colonists and everyone in the village knew it, but I wasn’t a mujahid either, and it bothered a great many people that I was sitting there in the middle, in that intermediary state, as if I was taking a nap under a rock on the beach or kissing a beautiful young woman’s breasts while my mother was getting robbed or raped. “They’re going to ask you that,” the guard threw out before closing the cell door. I knew what he was talking about. Afterward I slept, but before that, I listened. It was all I had to do, I didn’t smoke, and I hadn’t minded when they took my shoelaces and my belt and everything I had in my pockets. I didn’t want to kill time. I don’t like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can. For once, there was no corpse on my back! I decided to enjoy my idleness. Did I think about how badly the next day could turn out? A little, no doubt, but I didn’t dwell on it. Death was something I was strangely used to. I could move from the living to the deceased, from the hereafter to the sun, just by changing the given names: Harun (my name), Musa, Meursault, or Joseph. According to preference, almost. In the first days of Independence, death was as gratuitous, absurd, and unexpected as it had been on a sunny beach in 1942. I could be accused of anything, my chances of being shot as an example or set free with a kick in the butt were just about equal, and I knew it. Then evening came along with a handful of stars, and the darkness dug a hole in my cell, blurred the outlines of the walls, and brought a sweet smell of grass. It was still summer, and by peering into the blackness I was eventually able to glimpse a bit of the moon, which was slowly sliding my way. I slept again, for a very long time, while unseen trees tried to walk, flailing about with their big branches in the effort to free their black, fragrant trunks. My ear was glued to the ground of their struggle.
XI
They questioned me several times, but it was just so they could find out who I was, and the sessions never took very long.
At the police station, no one seemed to be interested in my case. Nevertheless, an officer in the Army of National Liberation eventually received me. He looked me over with curiosity and asked me several questions: name, address, occupation, date and place of birth. I answered politely. He was quiet for a moment, seemed to be looking for something in a notebook, and then he fixed his gaze on me again, this time with hardened eyes, and asked, “You know Monsieur Larquais?” I didn’t want to lie — I didn’t need to. I knew I wasn’t there for having committed a murder but for not having done so at the right moment. I’m summing it up like that to make it easier for you to understand. I gave a smart-ass reply: “Some people used to know him, I believe.” The man was young, but the war had aged him — unevenly, if I may say so. His face, now stiff and stern, was wrinkled in places, but I could tell he had some vigorous muscles under his shirt, and his skin showed the suntan people get when they have nothing but holes and maquis to hide in. He smiled at my attempt to evade him. “I’m not asking for the truth. Nobody needs that here. If it turns out you killed him, you’ll pay.” He burst out laughing. His laughter was big, powerful, booming, incredible. “Who would’ve thought I’d have to judge an Algerian for the murder of a Frenchman?” he asked between guffaws. He was right. As I well knew, I wasn’t there for having killed Joseph Larquais, nor would I be, not even if Joseph Larquais came there in person to accuse me, flanked by two witnesses and flaunting the two bullets I fired into his body in the palm of one hand, with his shirt rolled up under his armpits. I was there because I’d killed him all by myself, and for no good reason. “You understand?” the officer asked me. I said I did.
They brought me back to my cell so the officer could go to lunch. I did nothing and waited. I was sitting down, not thinking about very much. One leg lolled, as if posing, in a pool of sunlight. The skylight held the whole sky. I could hear distant conversations and the sounds of trees. I wondered what Mama was doing. She must surely be sweeping the courtyard, I thought, and conversing with all her family and friends. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the door opened and I was taken to the colonel’s office once again. He was waiting for me, calmly sitting under the huge Algerian flag that was hanging on the wall. A revolver lay on the corner of his desk. They had me sit on a chair, where I remained unmoving. The officer didn’t say anything, letting a heavy silence settle over us. I suppose he wanted to act on my nerves, to get me upset. I smiled, because that was a bit like the method Mama used when she wanted to punish me. “You’re twenty-seven,” he began, and then he leaned toward me with fire in his eyes, pointing an accusing finger. He shouted, “So why didn’t you take up arms to liberate your country? Answer me! Why?” His features struck me as vaguely comical. He stood up, violently yanked a drawer open, pulled out a little Algerian flag, came over to me, and waved it under my nose. In a threatening and rather nasal voice, he said, “Do you know what this is? Do you?” I replied, “Yes, of course.” Then he launched into a patriotic rant, reiterating his faith in his independent country and in the sacrifice made by one and a half million martyrs. “This Frenchman, you should have killed him with us, during the war, not last week!” I didn’t see what difference that made, I replied. Visibly taken aback, he was silent for a while, and then he roared, “It makes all the difference!” He gave me a dirty look. I asked what the difference was. He started stammering, declaring that killing and making war were not the same thing, that we weren’t murderers but liberators, that nobody had given me orders to kill that Frenchman, and that I should have done it before. “Before what?” I asked. “Before July 5! Yes, before, not after, damn it!” There were a few sharp raps on the door, and then a soldier entered and placed an envelope on the desk. This interruption seemed to exasperate the colonel. The soldier gave me a quick glance and withdrew. “Well?” the officer said. I replied that I didn’t understand, and I asked him, “If I killed Monsieur Larquais on the fifth of July at two o’clock in the morning, are we supposed to say the war was still going on, or had Independence already come? Was it before or after?” The officer sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, reached out a surprisingly long arm, and dealt me a monumental slap in the face. I felt my cheek go icy cold, then fiery hot, and my eyes got involuntarily moist. I had to straighten my spine. After that, nothing happened. We remained where we were, both of us, face-to-face. The colonel’s arm slowly returned to its place by his side, and I probed the inside of my cheek with my tongue. We heard a voice in the corridor, and the officer used the opportunity to break the silence: “Is it true that your brother was killed by a Frenchman?” I said yes, but that was before the revolution broke out. The colonel suddenly looked very tired. “It should simply have been done before,” he murmured, almost pensively. “There are rules to obey,” he added, as if to convince himself of the soundness of his reasoning. He asked me to tell him again exactly what my occupation was. “I’m a government official. Land Administration,” I told him. “A useful profession for the nation,” he muttered, as though to himself. Then he asked me to tell him Musa’s story, but his mind seemed to be on something else. I told him what I knew, which is to say, not much. The officer listened to me distractedly and then concluded that my tale was a bit thin, not to say improbable. “Your brother’s a martyr, but you, I don’t know …” I found this way of putting it incredibly profound.
Somebody brought him a cup of coffee, and he dismissed me. As I was leaving the room, he rapped out, “We know all about you, you and all the others. Don’t forget that.” I didn’t know how to answer, so I didn’t say anything. Back in my cell, I started feeling chagrined. I knew I was going to be released, and the knowledge cooled the strange ardor boiling inside me. The walls seemed
to close in, the skylight shrank, all my senses panicked. The night was going to be bad, dull, suffocating. I tried to think about pleasant things such as swans’ nests, but nothing worked. They were going to set me free without explanation, whereas I wanted to be sentenced. I wanted to be relieved of the heavy shadow that was turning my life into darkness. There was even something unjust about their letting me go like that, without explaining whether I was a criminal, a murderer, a dead man, a victim, or simply an undisciplined moron. I found their casual attitude toward my crime almost insulting. I had killed, the thought made me incredibly dizzy. Yet basically nobody had anything bad to say about that. Only the timing seemed to pose a vague problem. What negligence, what flippancy! Didn’t they see they were disqualifying my act, obliterating it, by treating it like that? The gratuitousness of Musa’s death was unconscionable. And now my revenge had just been struck down to the same level of insignificance!