Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  After Ben Chekroun had finished his labours, the house fell into the hands of an immigrant newly arrived from far-off Transylvania. We never quite knew what that meant, but we suspected that he was Romanian by day, Hungarian by night and a ferryman in times of trouble. It was as he took his last step down the steamship’s gangplank that the rogue and the stranger met by sheer chance. It is possible that, as has been attested, the deal was struck quickly and quietly in the best interests of all concerned. But that is simply legalistic jargon, a magical incantation; I am more inclined to believe that two deaf-mutes could not have made more noise in trying to make themselves heard. Ben Chekroun was, after all, a man of some importance and the newcomer was not just anyone. He is remembered as a character who might have stepped straight out of the silver screen. Perhaps it is possible to be born in the Carpathians and retain one’s humanity, but our character believed only in the supernatural. Vampires were his friends, he spoke of them as of some eternal truth. When he arrived, he bore the unpronounceable name Tartem-something-or-other; his first name, a real tongue-twister, was Crzhyk-I-forget-what. A simple greeting was a real mouthful. Back in the snow-capped mountains of Transylvania, he had served a Voivode – a warlord – descended from the race of Phanariotes about whom the literature of the region has nothing good to say. In short, he had learned from a master the gentle art of treachery. I suspect the negotiations were dramatic and long-drawn-out and attracted a vast crowd. A quick trip to the town hall and suddenly our friend Tartem-thingumabob declares himself ready to die for the country of Rousseau. Immediately, the insults hurled at him by first-generation immigrants ceased. Overnight, he became just another pied noir like everyone else. Back then, integration simply meant shucking your shoes and donning a beret. Once you’d done that, you could run around proclaiming that you had truly arrived. ‘Ze suis frantuzeasca?!’ he roared, as the Negroes on the docks waiting for corvettes might have yelled ‘Bwana, bwana!’ I assume people said such things, it was in the spirit of the times, part of the local colour of the period, like gas streetlamps. From that day forth, he styled himself François Carpatus. He cannily established a reputation as an excellent repairman, which brought customers to his ironmongery-cum-seed-merchants-cum-grocery-cum-haberdashery-cum-gunsmiths-cum-perfumery, a chaotic Aladdin’s cave of the kind that existed long ago. A terror of vampires, hitherto unknown in our part of the world, mysteriously spread through the medina and with it the remedies to be rid of it, from garlic braids to consecrated wooden stakes. It was François Carpatus who converted our barn into a shop, something that proved extremely profitable for those who came after him – all except for Doctor Montaldo, the last occupant of the house before we arrived. Nor was it particularly profitable for us, since by then the Algerian government had decided to adopt the Soviet model of feeding a starving populace, and we were not granted a licence to run a shop (Papa dreamed of owning a delicatessen stocked with everything that anyone could want).

  Towards the end of his life, at the turn of the twentieth century, M. Carpatus suffered a mysterious ailment, a sort of delirium tremens brought on by an overdose of garlic. After a number of fruitless treatments, he emigrated to the United States and was never heard of again. American vampires clearly did not recognise him as one of their own.

  It’s difficult to know exactly what happened next, the machinations and the manoeuvres, the whole business was shrouded in secrecy, but the house was bought by . . . a certain Daoud Ben Chekroun! By this time, Carpatus was no longer in his right mind and may rashly have sold his assets at a knock-down price; then again, pretending to be mad can be a great advantage in negotiations.

  All sorts of ridiculous rumours have been circulated by wagging tongues about the aforementioned Mustafa, Louis-Joseph-Youssef, Ben Chekroun, Carpatus. A crooked Turk, a Frenchman who stumbled into the melting pot of Islam, a wandering Jew, an abominable snowman from the Carpathians, a Doctor Schweitzer who died on the job. What better tales to inspire a wandering storyteller? As children we lapped it up, we delighted in these far-fetched stories which also enhanced the prestige of our house. Genies, vampires, hidden treasures, apparitions by prophets, paranormal phenomena, Jewish fables, we had stories enough to while away many a pleasant evening. Other people might have envied us.

  These tales still run through my head, they fuse, they feed on one another, speaking in their different tongues, garbed in their different costumes. I shift from one century to another, one foot here and my head on some distant continent. This explains why I seem to be from everywhere and nowhere, a stranger in this country and yet firmly entrenched within these walls. Nothing is more relative than the origin of things.

  Fantasies have always been the means of killing time in Rampe Valée. People who live by old stories do not notice the passing of time, if I can put it like that.

  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century – a dismal period – the house was occupied by various nonentities, pen-pushers, newcomers, large families. They all knew Daoud Ben Chekroun through his kids, Jacob, Zadok, Elijah and his great-nephews Ephraim and Mordecai (though they knew them by their Muslim names). Sceptics might suspect some posthumous ploy on the part of the old curmudgeon, but in fact the subterfuge was dictated by events. The turbulent period was marked by successive waves of Jewish immigrants to Algeria which, with a contemptuous click of their tongue, people back then brazenly referred to as the Yid Invasions. Such prejudices were fuelled by the Socialist anti-Jewish leagues, the Crémieux Decree, the Dreyfus Affair and Musette’s tales of the vagabond Cagayous. This is history, it is convoluted and calamitous. The newcomers, as I said, stayed just long enough to put together a case file and lodge it with the town hall. Meanwhile, an ideal habitat for the Town Mouse had just been devised: the tower block. As wealth trickled down to the colonies, tower blocks sprang up in Algiers and its suburbs. A vast procession of people cheerfully rushed to live there, transporting their belongings in vans, in handcarts, on pack mules, in convoys led by children singing at the tops of their voices as little old ladies trailed behind devoutly muttering suras. No sooner had they climbed the stairs and set up camp than pennants – and laundry – were hoisted on the balconies. The war between neighbours could now begin. As I set down the story of my misfortunes, that war is beginning to seem like a massacre, one covertly fuelled by those who work as government officials by day and estate agents by night. At the foot of the stairwells, the children finish off the wounded and race to see the imam for their reward. All these fleeting comings and goings did much damage to the house. The series of ‘renovations’ proved in time to be mutilations: veneer, formica, linoleum and leatherette gradually invaded the venerable old house driving out the terracotta floor-tiles, the stucco, the mosaics and the coppers, even the lingering smell of old leather. It was a terrible shame.

  The neighbourhood changed radically. It became a warren. Buildings sprang up here and there, this way and that, aslant and askew, seedy hovels and lavish residences, a maze of narrow streets and blind alleys appeared out of nowhere and with them crooked flights of steps, rubbish tips, open sewers, filthy gutters, cowsheds, cheap restaurants, a synagogue, seven mosques, some sort of temple that vanished into the crowd, three cemeteries, cramped shops, brothels, overflow pipes, smithies and, later, two or three schools built of corrugated iron on the children’s playgrounds and a complaints office that was burned to the ground on the precise day and time it was inaugurated by the mayor and his entourage of estate agents. Out of the misery of the mid-twentieth century, a favela was born, one that may endure for centuries.

  And yet, for the longest time I found it impossibly romantic to be living here in Rampe Valée, this tangled world where mystery and misery battled it out in a hell of noise and dust and mud. It was a particular phase in my life when I subscribed to a certain idea of utopia, I was discovering Gandhi and Mother Teresa, Rimbaud and his cohorts, I felt a kinship with Calcutta, with Mogadishu, with the ghettos of Pretoria and the favelas of Bahia.
I was electrified by tragedies in far-flung places. These days I’ve had enough, now I dream only of palaces, of carriages, of high society, of passionate fleeting affairs.

  Opposite our lavish mansion was a drab little house, a sandcastle crowned with a peaked cap built by a man about whom we never really knew anything. Some said he worked on the streetcars, others that he worked for the National Tobacco and Safety Match Corporation, that he was a fitter for the gas company, a sales rep for Orangina, a tax inspector, a cement packer with Lafarge, a teacher of some unknown subject, and various other things. Too much information is no information. In short, everyone had their own view of him. During the war he was rarely spotted. After Independence, he disappeared or at least he kept a low profile. Some insisted that he was a traitor who had secretly supported French rule as an active member of the OAS and that sinister meetings had taken place within these walls, while others maintained it had been used as a safe house by one of the leaders of the FLN during the Battle of Algiers. Gradually, people began to forget, they left behind those stories of good guys and bad guys. Life after Independence was no bed of roses, the good ship Algeria was being skippered by incompetents and crooks, everyone aboard was panicking. With time memories fade, but they emerge again and so the thread of history remains unbroken. We told each other strange stories, about how our enigmatic neighbour had abandoned the house across the road because it was hunted – I mean haunted. It was a sorry sight, shrouded in cobwebs, creepers and weeds and encased like an ancient mummy in desiccated bird droppings. Only a single pair of shuttered windows is still visible; the windows that face my house. A ghost was the only logical explanation for such a baleful building and so that was what we decided, and ever afterwards we called it the ghost’s house. This is the ghost I now call Bluebeard. The neighbours give him other names, each related to their deepest fears: Bouloulou, Barbapoux, Azrael, Frankenstein, Dracula, Fantômas.

  Only the old-timers still remember the period the good Doctor Montaldo spent living here. They refer to it as the poor man’s house, as though God himself had sojourned here and they resent me for not carrying on the tradition. I pull a few strings for them at the hospital when I have a chance, it’s my way of applying a little arnica to their memory, of earning their respect. The good doctor spent too much of his time tending to the poor and needy, he gave little thought to repairs, to comfort, to cosiness. His legacy includes a basin and a tap in the room he once used as his surgery, a collection of surgical instruments and medical books – which proved very useful to me in my studies. It’s astonishing how, in the past half a century, medical knowledge has changed without really changing. There is some indefinable difference between the textbooks of then and now, but I’m too dim to spot it. I would say it was context, but where does that get us? Mourad talks about governance, in fact it’s all he talks about, but I don’t know what the word means. I’m not ashamed to admit that medicine is just a job to me, there is nothing profound or poetic about it. How the hell can anyone practise genuine, sincere, caring, holistic medicine when everything – people, ethics, cities, hospitals – is going to hell in a handcart? If proof were needed, the good doctor died penniless and exhausted while many of his patients ended up rich and powerful. Many went on to rule us with an iron hand and their successors – military and religious – still do so today.

  The memory of Doctor Montaldo brings a human face to my relationship with time even though I disapprove of treating villains as effectively as honest folk. In choosing paediatrics, I opted for the innocent; with children there can be no qualms of conscience, nice or not you treat them just the same and – hup! – off to bed.

  Finally my family arrived here on a September day in the year of our Lord 1962. It was a Sunday, the sun was at its height, we stepped into the house as into a temple, heads bowed, awe-stricken. At least that’s how I imagine the scene, since I came into the world somewhat later. We had come from Kabylia – from the mountains, the poverty, the cold – and we were little more than troglodytes, stubborn to the marrow and in permanent revolt against the Caïd and the capital. Now we found ourselves perched high above the capital, living in this magnificent mansion – vast, labyrinthine, mysterious, Olympian. And antiquated, with deep wrinkles and a look about it as though it had forgotten how to weather time. How Papa came to own this house I have no idea; he had his secrets and he took them to his grave. I was born ten years after my older brother Yacine on an October day in 1966. For seven long years, war had kept my parents apart, and it took them three more years to learn to rekindle the passion of lovebirds. Papa needed to forget the harsh realities of the maquis while Maman needed to remember what, over time, she had forgotten. We were the first native-born Algerians to own this extraordinary house. We felt as though, since the dawn of time, it had been waiting for us to arrive when in fact we hadn’t had the first idea where we were going. Uprooted from our mountain lair, we looked out at the sky as though it were boundless. The house had known so many people, had travelled far and wide. It taught us much about ourselves and about its former occupants. Scarcely credible stories of lives as hazy as mirages, true tales filled with spice and suspense. The lightest ones always float to the surface, but vast, unfathomed depths lie beneath, throbbing like a pulsar. How would we ever have known of the existence of vampires if the mysterious Carpatus had stayed in his native Transylvania? The djinns that populated our oldest memories suddenly seemed less powerful, but they were more sympathetic since they fed, not on hot blood sucked from the carotid artery of another human being, but upon the same misery we did. Would I have chosen to study medicine had I not stumbled upon Doctor Montaldo’s textbooks as a girl? Where else would we have come upon the stories, the sayings, the jokes from distant lands that enlivened our evenings? Not to mention the humdrum things we gradually discovered about life, the world, the customs and habits of different peoples, the way their stories intertwined with ours, and the interminable questions that clutter the mind from dawn till dusk – the why of one thing, the how of another – and all that this entails, the obsessive fears, the wounded silences, the constant migraines. An ancient house is a succession of stories laid down in strata, thick or thin, with evil sprites flitting along seams and veins. And this is how we experienced it – in exaltation, striving and doubt.

  Everything about this place speaks of ancient mysteries.

  This house, my house, has also taught me sorrow, fear and loneliness.

  That is the story of my family. The house is the centre, time is Ariadne’s thread which must be uncoiled without being broken. I am the last to live here. When I am gone, it will crumble and the story will be over.

  While brooding about all this and cursing Sofiane’s recklessness, I had a sort of epiphany: yesterday, today and doubtless tomorrow and on until the end of time, more people have fled this country than have arrived. There is no logic to it, it is not in the nature of the earth to bring forth a vacuum, no mother dreams of driving her children away and no man has the right to uproot another from his birthplace. It is a curse that has survived from century to century from Roman times when we were wild-eyed Circumcellions razing farms all the way to the present day when, since we cannot all burn our bridges and flee, we live with our bags permanently packed. This is a huge country, vast enough to accommodate whole peoples; if necessary we could have taken more from our neighbours who don’t need so much space, but no, at some point or other the curse returns and the vacuum brutally swells. Since the beginning of time we have always been harragas, those who burn a path, such is the course of our history.

  Could it be that my time to leave was coming?

  Algiers never ceases to amaze. Though it is a master of the low blow, it knows how to take care of its own and, when one of them is in the depths of despair, it never fails to throw her a lifeline. Today was one of those auspicious days for which Algiers is famous. The heatwave unexpectedly abated, the southerly wind shifted and now blew from the north, singing through the leaves. The air
was filled with the whispers of the Mediterranean, its subtle scents, its piquant charms, its musky pleasures, its sun-dappled dreams. And the natives of Algiers, the worst city dwellers of the century, suddenly, eagerly, surrender to peace. They are amazed, they look at each other in shock, but still they forge ahead, curious to discover the extent of this illusion. One thing leads to another, there is a surge of optimism, a ripple of friendliness and before they know it people begin to think that this, too, is life. Suddenly, there is an outpouring of joy and a glorious torrent of heedless happiness sweeps across the city like a wadi bursting its banks. Hearts stirring, the women feel themselves come alive, they dare to raise their heads, to steal a glance through their hijabs. It is perfect bliss to see them taking part in life, to witness their strange and fascinating radiance dispel the darkness and the pain. God Himself is moved by such a sight, you can see it in the faces of the children which glow with good intentions. People dazzle so brightly it puts their drab Islamic rags to shame and they risk being publicly excommunicated. This just goes to prove that people should never give up their instinctive irreverence; some day the Islamists will dig their own graves and people will mock their shrivelled poisonous humps. On a day like today the Islamists feel ill at ease, swept up by the tide of joy, hemmed in on all sides, they scrabble away desperately, run to their caves there to dream of the glorious crimes against humanity yet to be committed. The exultant atmosphere of celebration begins to course through the streets, to scale the buildings, to flash from one person to the next. This is a critical moment: the devil himself, tail whipping high above his horns, might suddenly appear and ruin everything. When Algiers is beautiful, it happens of a sudden. She wrong-foots her citizens. It is love at first sight. We think of her as a wizened old crone who died in misery and is buried beneath the dust, but still sometimes she steps into the light, she dazzles, bewitches, steals, ravishes, enchants. After a little prenuptial perplexity, the city grows more civilised in leaps and bounds, great discoveries are anticipated. We would dearly love to make the most of our good fortune, to pause this moment, to bask in this hopefulness, build castles in the air; but we know Algiers all too well, she is a pantomime villain, playing the innocent is her favourite trick. Because we know this, whenever she strikes a pose we simply shrug. We simply dare to wish that a crowd of tourists would arrive in one of these magical moments so that we might surprise them, might strip away the preconceptions they have about our nonsensical stories, our dirty wars, our conspiracies against reason, our crimes against the heart, our medieval customs, our insufferable weather, our tortuous geography. Algiers is a trollop who gives of herself the better to take. Her going rate is five minutes of pleasure for one month of bitterness.