Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  People assume that little girls spend their whole time talking about boyfriends when in fact they also dream of the brother they long for or the brother they would turn into a toad without a second thought. That was true of us. We had boyfriends and we did talk about them, but only to say they were dumb and boring. Little girls also think about the sister they desperately miss or the one they would happily see burn in hell, but rarely talk about them. This too was true of us: we avoided the subject since Louiza was determined that none of the little witches should be spared and I was furious at the idea she would consign her adorable little sister to the flames.

  At sixteen, the beautiful Louiza was married off to a pauper from some distant, utterly benighted suburb. He gave her a string of daughters and not a single son. In genetics, it’s either one thing or the other. Poor darling Louiza always got the opposite of what she wished for. She was the youngest of the family and no one listened to her. The wedding was a leper’s funeral. Beneath the tattered rags of an inoffensive city tramp, her husband turned out to be a dangerous fanatic hostile to joy and to fantasy. His lips flecked with spittle, he harangued us with verses ripped from the Qur’an and baleful threats from the terrorists’ handbook. Since the situation called for spinelessness, the other men puffed out their chests and began spouting suras like suicide bombers. Ever since, I’ve been traumatised, I keep asking myself: does Islam produce true believers, craven cowards or just terrorists? There is no easy answer since all three are talented actors. And besides, it turns out that Islam these days is both a performance and a powerful weapon in the hands of grave-robbers. The girls suppressed their rebellious ways, gave up the fight and quietly stared at each other all night, huddled behind their grandmother’s skirts. It would have been good to cry, but the philistines had all but forbidden us from breathing. In the distance, as night enfolded the city like a shroud, we could hear bitter rumblings and shameful silences. I never saw my beloved Louiza again. What mortuary does she live in now? What little news I have of her seems to come from beyond the grave.

  Time flew by and I found myself alone. As I stumbled on, I stockpiled sorrows: university, the dreariness of college work, the pettiness of fellow students, the endless betrayals and setbacks, the scrabble to find a job – any job – the self-seeking recommendations and those that led nowhere. All this takes time, takes years, and leaves its scars. Then, finally, a stroke of luck, a smile sent from heaven: I happened to be at the Parnet clinic when the consultant paediatrician tossed his white coat at the feet of the hospital administrator, a cousin of the Minister for Health and a nephew of the Pasha. He was exultant, brandishing a visa offering him refugee status in Canada; from seven thousand miles away Lady Luck had smiled on him. His luck was also mine. That same day, I donned my white coat. The hospital administrator thought it best to prove he was a man and act quickly before the rumour mill started. ‘Go to hell, you little queer,’ he spat, grabbing his crotch. ‘The next person I come across gets your job!’ I was there, I heard him. For better or worse, I signed up. The salary didn’t exactly break the bank, but it pays enough to eat and I’ve learned to make the best of leftovers, potluck stews and ratatouille. That day I learned all there was to know about the Arab-Islamic economy: at work just like at home, the men chat and the women toil and there’s no rest on Sunday for anyone. My married colleagues, mothers with children, daughters-in-law with mothers-in-law, work a forty-eight-hour day, with twelve hours in arrears that count double as soon as the grandchildren arrive, so I’ve got nothing to complain about, my time is my own. Allah’s sun shines on some and not on others. How to deflect its orbit is a prickly question, one I no longer think about.

  Time and again death visited this house and with it came the cortèges, the mourners, the funeral vigils, the steady string of solicitors, offers on the house, tongue-tied acquaintances, marriage proposals from men clutching a measuring tape in one hand, and, always in full view, the imam in his slippers pontificating. On the fortieth day of my last period of mourning, I drew a line under things and I shut the windows and the doors. Emptiness closed over me like a tombstone over the dead, but it was my emptiness and I could fill it as I pleased. On the blessed day, I accorded myself the minor privilege of dying as I chose. Better to be a prisoner who is free inside her head, I thought, than a jailer who is a prisoner of his keys and besides, it is good and necessary that there should be a wall between freedom and imprisonment. In doing so, I joined the most reviled mob in the Islamic world, the company of free, independent women. In such circumstances, it is best to grow old quickly, hence my premature wrinkles. For a woman living beneath the green flag of Algeria, growing old brings not devastation, but salvation.

  In a few short months I had faced a lifetime of mourning. Death dogged my family, determined to wipe out everyone. It ignored me, though I pleaded on bended knee. I am the last of the Mohicans, I wonder who will wear mourning weeds for me. Papa was the first to go, he died of heart failure; three months later, my mother died of a broken heart and not long afterwards my brother Yacine died at the wheel of his car – the one great love of his life – a Renault 5, periwinkle blue fitted with a radio and a steering lock, a bargain imported from Marseilles by ‘Scrap Iron Ali’, the local racketeer. Paid for out of family money, as we reminded him every Sunday when, pristine as a bar of soap, he prepared to take French leave. He looked like a ladykiller from the 1930s, ready to fall for the first femme fatale. We pretended to be watching over the crockpot while he hugged the walls, knowing that he had to find himself a wife. It was high time, he was almost thirty, he was beginning to stoop, to cough at the slightest gust of wind, to sit in his slippers and snore. He had got a job in the administration, he was inured to it now. We lured the prettiest flowers in the neighbourhood to our house, we scoured the city for miles around like guardians of a harem. We looked for true virgins, no counterfeits. The matchmakers quickly got involved and poor Maman suddenly found herself busy going to cemeteries and funeral vigils – the key places where marriages are arranged – and visiting the shrines of marabouts where unthinkable things are done and undone. I was left to search the usual haunts: secondary schools, dressmakers’ shops, weddings, hammams, bus stops. I brought home heaps of girls, beautiful and intelligent girls, fervent traditionalists and borderline crackpots, blondes, brunettes, eccentrics and teenagers, every one of them free, but every time the idiot turned up his nose, turned his back on the parade, he was determined to comb the streets like a big boy and find his own Mata Hari. The poor bastard thought he could outwit the wily matchmakers. He was driving his little car slowly past the government buildings towards the Club des Pins, when a sports car ploughed into him, we were told, it was more an insinuation than an explanation. Fed up seeing him spend half his life waxing the car and the other half watching it like a hawk in case a bird shat on the paintwork, we used to mock him: ‘Are you planning to marry that old wreck of yours?’ He took it badly. It had been our way of warning him, since there was something animal about his passion for his car, about his need to show off. Our mourning was tinged with bitter guilt, as our jokes and jibes came back to haunt us. I’ve never been able to shake off the thought that we brought him bad luck. To refer to his car as a ‘wreck’ was like sounding a death knell. Forgive me, Yacine, forgive me, my brother. Lastly there was Sofiane. With his first cigarette, he got it into his head that, come weal or woe, he would leave the country and get as far away as possible. ‘Better to die elsewhere than to live here!’ he would scream whenever I tried to reason with him. ‘If you can’t live at home, what’s the point of dying next door?’ I would shout back. This was my argument, the only one I could think of. What I was trying to say is that dying is not difficult; the trick is learning how to live, the locale is of secondary importance. But he could think of nothing else, could focus on nothing but finding an escape route, getting his papers, studying the stratagems of those who had made the great leap, poring over their glorious failures. He barely spoke, barely ate
and came home only to brood over his rage. Then, one morning at dawn – bam! – he left. He headed west, taking the most dangerous route: to Oran and via the border to Morocco, Spain and from there to France, to England, to anywhere, that was his plan. I only found out later that day, after I had trawled the neighbourhood and finally flushed out one of his friends – another candidate for suicide – at a secret, mystical meeting. There was a crowd of them, a veritable congregation, drunk on their own tears, dreaming aloud, telling each other how the great wide world was waiting for them with flowers, and how fleeing this country would deal a fatal blow to the reign of the dictator. Long story short, they were all touched by the same fever. They gathered round me like a big sister ennobled by great sorrow and informed me that Sofiane had gone the way of the harragas – the ‘path-burners’. I was familiar with the expression, this was how everyone in the country referred to those who burned their bridges, who fled the country on makeshift rafts and destroyed their papers when caught. But this was the first time I had heard the word from the lips of a true zealot, and it sent a chill down my spine. He said it nonchalantly; to him, ‘burning a path’ was something only they knew how to do. I was lumbered with ‘honour’ and they with the responsibility of covering Sofiane’s still-warm tracks. What can you say about such morons? I stared at them the way you might at a lost prophet and shook their dust from my sandals. I would happily have denounced them to the police but for the fact that the police – who constantly interrogated them, frisked them, manipulated them, spat in their faces – were at the root of their delirium. On the road the harragas take there is no turning back, every fall leads to another, one harder and more painful, until the final, fatal plunge. We’ve all witnessed it: satellite TV beams back the pictures of corpses lying broken on the rocks, or tossed by the waves, frozen or suffocated in the cargo hold of a boat, a plane, in the back of a refrigerated van. As though we did not already have enough, the harragas have invented new ways of dying. Even those who succeeded in making the crossing lost their souls in the terrible kingdom of the undocumented immigrant. What kind of life is it, to be forever condemned to a clandestine existence?

  And what kind of life is it that I am leading, entombed here in my ancient house?

  I spent a whole month going round in circles, I shed every tear in my body. I scarcely looked up: Maman, my little brother is lost; Papa, my little brother is lost . . . I was racked with guilt at the thought of having let them down. I slept in Sofiane’s room so I would feel better.

  Then one night he phoned. From Oran. From that godforsaken hole where nothing – not the language, nor the religion, not even the taste of the bread – is the same as it is in Algiers.

  ‘Where in Oran?’

  ‘At a friend’s place.’

  ‘Who are you trying to kid? Your friends are here, in their own homes or in conclave electing a new pope.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘This has gone far enough, come home.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Give me your address so I can send you some money.’

  ‘I ain’t got no address.’

  ‘This friend of yours, is he homeless?’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Hello? Hello? Helloooo?’

  The little shit had already picked up an Oran accent, he said yeah for yes, he even clicked his tongue. Otherwise he was just the same: impulsive, mule-headed, thick as two short planks . . . and sweet as an angel when it suited him. He never phoned again. Was it something I said? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter; they’re all the same: stupid, easily offended, quick to pick a fight. Even now the question haunts me. It’s hard to be the sister of a man who’s still a boy. How many men realise that?

  Suddenly, the house seemed terrifying. The emptiness swelled, the silence became oppressive. I had no answers, I had no more questions. Nothing mattered any more, the daily tedium could come and sweep everything away. Dying did not seem like an agonising inevitability but a consummation devoutly to be wished. I won’t deny, there were times when I contemplated suicide. I even made my decision; all that remained was to work out when and how. I couldn’t make up my mind; premeditation made it difficult to think straight. After a while, I bounced back. That’s what I’m like, I lose hope and I bounce back.