Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  What was the connection between the man in the photo and Chérifa’s swollen belly? It was a question I could not help but ask myself. And now I have.

  It had been three days since I saw that old trout from the rue Marengo and now, bang on time – knock, knock – she shows up, all hot and flustered. And – unusually for her – she didn’t beat around the bush.

  ‘Oh, my dear, young people today, you simply can’t depend on them! They’re here one minute and gone the next! They’re only too happy to have us worrying and fretting over them, when all we want at our time of life is a little comfort, a little peace, but you might as well ask the town council for running water. How is it that I’ve never met this girl? The clothes she wears! What’s her name? Where’s her husband? What was she thinking, going out last night and coming home after midnight? Where did she go? And what was she doing, storming out again at dawn in such a terrible temper?’

  ‘Ah, Tante Zohra, what a coincidence! I was just going to pop round to see you. I hadn’t heard from you and I was starting to worry!’

  I know how Tante Zohra’s mind works, I’ve heard it all before and I’ve learned the best thing to do is bombard her with information and bamboozle her.

  ‘Were you talking about Chérifa? Pretty little thing, don’t you think? She’s my cousin’s youngest, you know – the cousin who moved to Oran just after the War, back when the Americans were bombing the mountain villages because they thought we were hiding Nazis. Then, when they realised that we were only hiding ourselves, they came back and showered us with chocolate bars. The kids stuck to them like leeches, the Yanks adopted them as mascots and we never saw hide nor hair of them again. Up in Kabylia, we had nothing to eat but acorn flour, green olives and goat’s cheese. Oh, I nearly forgot, up in the mountains our favourite fruit was figs, we used to pick them off the trees. You can’t till the soil up in Kabylia, it’s all rocks. So, anyway, this cousin of mine is on his deathbed and, sensing that the end is near, he’s asked his youngest daughter to visit the family on his behalf. Our family is scattered to the four winds, Allah alone knows us by our lamentations. You know better than I how widely scattered the Kabyle people were, hounded from town to town when we weren’t hounded out of existence. Well, anyway, little Chérifa, she comes, she goes, and likely will for some time, because, like I said, there are cousins everywhere, furtive exiles weighed down by sorrow and homesickness. And being an insomniac, she keeps odd hours. But what’s to be done, Tante Zohra? C’est la vie!’

  ‘And how is Sofiane? Did he go to Oran, surely he must have gone to say his goodbyes to this cousin of yours?’

  The way she just came out with it! She’s a cunning shrew, trying to trip me up.

  ‘No, no, my dear, you know Sofiane, he always did have his head in the clouds! Remember how whenever he passed your house he pretended not to see you?’

  My little performance earned me a week of peace and happiness. The old bat didn’t believe a word of my rigmarole, but it hardly mattered since all she needs to do her scandalmongering is her tongue and a little spit.

  That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. I scrubbed the house from top to bottom, I might even have cleaned it twice. While I was about it, I did the laundry, then I pottered around. I felt like I was in Kubrick’s The Shining just before all hell is unleashed. On my wanderings I discovered a makeshift corridor on the second floor running from the back of an old wardrobe to a sort of box-room – it was beyond me how I had never noticed it before. The door to the box-room creaked like it was a thousand years old. Slave quarters? A place to hide when things were tough? It was probably something constructed by the Turk, those people have a lot going on under their fezzes. Inside, I expected to find a skeleton or see a ghost surge forward and slip between my legs, but nothing. The room smelled of mildew. No gold doubloons, no pirate map, no clue what to do next. Some day I’ll leave a sheet of mysterious drawings here that will help my successor live, secure in the knowledge that his life will be rich and carefree. A pinch of gold dust, and the results would be better. This rickety old house evolved over time, there’s always something left to explore.

  Then, suddenly, my knees gave out. I’d overexerted myself. I went back to the living room and lay down, I read a book. I went into the kitchen and made some herbal tea and sipped it as I watched the cockroaches gorging on scraps of food. It’s been a long time since I’ve waged war against them. The future belongs to cockroaches. In some old scientific magazine I read that the more you persecute them the stronger they get, so I leave them be in the hopes that indolence and overeating will kill them off. Then, sadly, I listened to the radio babble on about this and that, a phone-in for parish-pump problems from far-flung, probably fictional listeners convinced their nightly ramblings are advancing some great cause. Tonight’s topic: civic-mindedness and household refuse. To a man (and woman), they put the blame on everyone else, not one of them was prepared to take any responsibility. The pathetic fools. When you’re this deluded, better to keep your mouth shut and not spout such drivel! When you’ve made your bed, you have to lie in it.

  Then I wept and wept and wept.

  I can’t help but wonder what times they are I’m living through. Things fell apart so quickly. Was there ever a before? Did I ever really live? Did I ever have anything other than my beloved parents who died too soon, my idiot little brother who disappeared into himself or is in the process of doing so? And Yacine, my big brother, who died by the roadside having known no greater love than his rickety old banger. It is easy to be overwhelmed by such emptiness. What century is it out there? The din and the dust that reach me in brutal waves have nothing of interest to say to me. The world has taken a wrong turning, ominous Islam and garish consumerism are battling it out with mantras and slogans. Their conflicting cacophony makes my ears hurt. Here in Algeria, even time itself – humanity’s world heritage – is torn between rabid reactionism and a ghastly futurism; its energy, its drive, its clarity have all been sapped. To embrace such twisted logic is to embrace the void. To say one thing is also to believe the contrary, it is to plunge furiously, hobbled and blinkered, into the fray. Why the blindfold? I don’t know. Time to these mutants is what dark glasses are to the blind man, it speaks to their inability to see and their inability to do. Through their fault or Voltaire’s, my life has gradually shrunk to nothing, to less than nothing, to a series of fits and starts between waking and sleeping before it stops altogether just as the clock in the hall fell silent when its master died. Time, where I am concerned, is a hodgepodge, a thing of shreds and patches, it blends scraps of my – happy but unfinished – childhood, a little of what I read, a lot of what I watch on television, fragments of dreams, a goodly helping of what fury proclaims to the four winds and, on a day-by-day basis, dictates my course of action. I have fashioned a life for myself that does not depend on money or on incense, I have no truck with religion, with clutter or procrastination. Or perhaps this is simply the way things are when you retreat to a desert island, when you sit rusting in a traffic jam. You make do with what you have. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never understood where wishes come from nor how disappointments are made, all I know is that I don’t care a tinker’s curse for the rantings of the truth-mongers. Like Penelope, I am deaf to suitors, committed to my work. My loneliness is my shield.

  In this life, you have to hold your own if you hope to emerge unscathed.

  The house – my house – has left me no choice. There are mornings, those gloomy mornings that seem like a painful prolongation of the night, when I feel as though I am a prisoner, albeit a willing one since I have no place else to hide. The house is over two hundred years old, I keep a weather eye on it, but I know, I can sense, that one day it will crumble with me inside. The house dates back to the seventeenth century, to the Regency of Algiers. The rooms are poky, the windows Lilliputian, the doors low and the stairs, which are treacherous, were clearly made by carpenters who had one leg shorter than the other and very narrow minds. This pe
rhaps explains – if explanation be needed – why everyone in my family grew up to have one calf muscle thicker than the other, a pronounced stoop, a waddle like a duck and very narrow minds. It has nothing to do with genetics; the house made us that way. Back then, the perpendicular was a mystery, since in this house lines never marry at right-angles, because they were never introduced by the mason’s trowel. It is a shock to the eyes. The nose, too, since a musty smell impregnates the walls. Sometimes I feel like an ant in a maze, sometimes like Alice in Wonderland.

  The house was built by an officer of the Ottoman court – an Effendi – a certain Mustafa Al Malik, whose name and coat of arms can still be seen to the left of the entrance, carved into an ornate marble plaque worn away by the years. Which is why people in the neighbourhood refer to us as the House of Mustafa. It’s a little unfortunate, since the man had a terrible reputation for being a paedophile – though back in those days, such crimes were tolerated in polite society.

  The house’s charm comes from the primitive mosaics, the nooks like the holes in Gruyère cheese into which are set old brasses, narrow corridors and the steep staircases which meander this way and that. Mystery pervades this house, around every corner is a ghost in a djellaba, a goateed genie rubbing his lamp, an overweight courtesan chained to a wizened old crone, a pot-bellied vizier plotting against the Caliph. Of course there is nothing really there, and yet you feel as though you might encounter anything.

  I grew up shrouded in this atmosphere, so it is hardly surprising that it has distorted my sense of time. Things would be different if I had grown up in an overcrowded tower block in some blighted suburb, on a marshy plain buffeted by the fumes from factories. Here I have space to dream to my heart’s content, all I lack are the funds. My salary is more conducive to sleepless nights than idle days.

  After the death of the Turk, the house embarked upon a new career. Whether by a twist of fate, or because it was built on the highest point of what would later be called the Rampe Valée – named after the Maréchal de France and Governor-General of Algeria whose contemporaries said he ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove – but whatever the reason, the Turkish officer was succeeded by a French officer, a certain Colonel Louis-Joseph de la Buissière, who was a viscount besides. His name and coat of arms are carved on the right-hand side of the pediment on a garlanded marble plaque eaten away by time. Nothing is known about his military career. I assume he earned his rank by proving himself on the battlefield, unless it was his by virtue of his ancestry. The fall of Charles X in 1830 brought about his own fall since, being a legitimist and a romantic, the colonel refused to allow the tricolour to replace the white cockade on his regimental pennant. He resigned his commission before he could be dismissed by Republican arrivistes and melted into the crowd of nobodies in Algiers. He was also a respected naturalist whose name features in the prestigious gazettes that paper the attic. He criss-crossed the wilds of Algeria on foot, by caleche, under the blazing sun, pencil in hand, making notes and sketches of everything the desert could offer up to his insatiable curiosity. He filled several volumes with extraordinarily meticulous drawings. It’s funny how beautiful a bitter, stunted, sprig of goat’s-foot can become beneath the scientist’s pencil. But little minds have little respect so the gazettes ended up in the attic where they have fed generations of mice hungry for knowledge. The world is as it is, made up of scholars and simpletons; what the former create the latter destroy. Somewhat belatedly, in the grip of who knows what passion, the colonel embraced Islam and married one of its daughters, a certain Mériem, the youngest child of a respectable apothecary in the Kasbah and took the name Youssef, which is simply the Arabic spelling of Joseph, favoured son of Jacob and Rachel. It was generally accepted that the colonel was a devout believer and he is often cited whenever someone feels the need to demonstrate how Islam is superior to all other religions. It has to be said that when famous Christians convert, it’s a bonus, which is why there’s so much media hype about Western celebrities who suddenly go over to Islam. I don’t really understand why these people embrace Islam with the sort of bluster usually reserved for defecting to the enemy. There’s a lot of nah, nah, nah-nah, nah! in their neurons. Now, a Muslim who converted to Christianity wouldn’t admit to it under torture, he wouldn’t tell his confessor, he would continue showing up to the mosque, fervent and fearless as a Taliban. It doesn’t matter, let people believe whatever they want as long as they don’t use it as an excuse to go around bumping people off. As it says in the Book: ‘I have sent to you the Qur’an and Muhammad to close the prophetic cycle of revelations.’ Thus it is permitted to grow and to improve, which is precisely what the viscount serenely did. The good Youssef died in the odour of sanctity at the ripe old age of ninety-something, he passed away in bed surrounded by relatives and friends, but there were those in Paris who were puzzled by his curious end. Being so far from civilisation, they expected him to die a violent death, to kick the bucket in some unseemly fashion, or at the very least to expire from some fever obscure enough to be considered exotic. And perhaps in the end he did, though in those days people were more likely to die of old age, starvation, an excess of sun or a kick from a horse though I’ll admit one could also die of a malaria epidemic, a plague of locusts or a dagger between the shoulder blades. The colonel left an estate that was enough to tempt the most disinterested observer, since he had substantial properties in Barbary as in his native Sologne. There ensued a confabulation between solicitors and much coming and going between Algiers and Paris. With consummate skill, the shysters quickly scoured the law books to see what portion they could reserve for the rich and what pittance might be left to the poor and order was thereby restored. They evicted old Madame Mériem with only her memories while the French branch of the de la Buissière family succeeded in clinging to their inheritance.

  The house was entrusted to a certain Daoud Ben Chekroun, a Jew from Bab Azoun who made a living brokering property deals between the retreating Turks and the advancing French and would end his life as rich as Croesus. At least that’s what it says on the daguerreotype we have which depicts him hunkered, leaning against a tumbledown hovel, one hand flicking a bull’s tail flyswatter, as hairy and dishevelled as an old gorilla. But I suppose it’s possible for a man to be rich and underhand. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he hoodwinked the photographer who in all good faith immortalised him in his poverty. The local elders of Rampe Valée, who convene their meetings in a café maure at the bottom of the valley, could think of no better names for the Turk’s citadel than the Frenchman’s palace, the Convert’s fortress, the Jew’s lair, the crow’s nest, the fox’s den. The names stuck and did us considerable harm. Applied to us, devout Muslims since birth, in a free, independent, overzealous country imbued with Arabo-Islamic contempt, ‘convert’ meant ‘kafir’, ‘Frenchman’ was synonymous with harki – the name given to the traitorous Algerians who fought with the French during the War of Independence – and what could the word ‘Jew’ mean but ‘thief’? The fact that we earned our living as indefatigable shopkeepers only served to fuel the rumours.

  It is to Monsieur Louis-Joseph that we owe the magnificent fireplace in the parlour, the passageway that leads into the garden, the conversion of the hammam into a bathroom and of the baker’s oven into a modern kitchen. He cleverly solved the water problem by sinking a well in the garden and installing a labyrinthine network of pipes. Being warm-hearted and compassionate, he erected a public drinking fountain on the street which, in the short term, bankrupted the local trader who peddled this precious commodity and in the long term sparked a bitter war between those who voted to keep the fountain and the free water, and those who maintained the water was poisoned and brought forward as many snivelling witnesses as there were beggars in the medina. While he was about it, Monsieur Louis-Joseph installed a splendid grandfather clock in the hall whose golden pendulum was later substituted for a lead weight by some light-fingered person. Ever since, weighed down with lea
d, it has groaned as though being tortured. Having converted to become Youssef, he had his study-cum-oratory decorated with beautiful tiles bearing suras from the Qur’an calligraphed by great poets, he divided the ground-floor living room in two, placing a stunning mashrabiya down the middle to create one side for the men, the other for women. On the first floor, he had a gynaeceum – a harem – built, sealed on four sides, and fitted with all the modern conveniences so beloved of subjugated females: a coal-fired stove, a pitcher and a washbowl. He raised the walls surrounding the house and topped them with shards of glass to reinforce the prison atmosphere I find so painful now that there is fighting in the streets, now that I have reinforced the doors and windows and no longer go out. Finally, he installed a charming ablutions area where the faithful could perform wudu.