Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  ‘. . . my stepmother hated me, I swear, it’s like I was trying to replace her! I loathe her, she’s ugly, she’s evil, she’s a thief. She called me the devil’s daughter, she’d claim she’d seen me when I hadn’t even done anything.’

  ‘Seen you where . . . doing what?’

  ‘With boys!’

  ‘I suspected as much.’

  ‘Papa is a coward, whenever he got me on my own, he’d plead with me, beg me to hide myself behind the hijab to avoid the wrath of his bloodsucking wife and the cut-throat religious bastards. So I packed a bag and left. It serves them right!’

  ‘Now listen to me, around here I don’t want you saying you’re not religious. I swear, you’re soft in the head. This is Islam we’re talking about, they’ll burn you alive and me with you!’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Oh, but you do care! You’ve got a baby on the way, and I don’t fancy being burned at the stake.’

  ‘Then I’ll go away and you won’t have to worry.’

  ‘Go where? These people are out there, it’s like The X Files. And don’t say you’ll go to Europe, because let me tell you they’ve got their feet under the table there too, and things are getting to be pretty tough for girls!’

  ‘Then I’ll go somewhere else.’

  ‘You little fool. It’s the same everywhere.’

  ‘I’ll . . . um . . .’

  ‘You see? You can learn when you make an effort.’

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘But you’re right – why should we give a damn about religion? Why should we go around weeping and wailing? If Allah doesn’t love us, too bad! We’ll go with Satan. Come on, let’s go into town, we’ll show them, we’ll have a ball, we’ll eat ice cream, we’ll have a laugh, we’ll walk in the sunshine, we’ll squander my money on fripperies and while we’re at it, we’ll buy some shameless clothes! And if they burn us, so what? We’ll shoot straight to hell like dazzling fireworks!’

  Dear God, the tailspin! When your heart is in it, it’s hard not to love Algiers. It was a revelation, the city opened wide its slick arms to welcome us. The shops, the bazaars, the salons de thé, we were all smiles as we strolled along the boulevards and stopped off in the parks. Chérifa swayed her belly and her hips as to the manner born while I – not having the figure of a skinny nymphet – was humble and unassuming. Hard on our heels, moving to the same rhythm, the freaks and fanatics followed behind, waiting for any excuse to pounce. Just before the trouble broke out, I turned into a scandalous woman and suddenly they scuttled into the alleyways like cockroaches. More cowards working towards their shame. To our delight, we did not see it coming. We did not even realise night had drawn in until we saw people heading home, heads bowed, walking quickly. Decent folk ran for cover. It was a stampede. Let them run, the cowards! The curfew in Algiers was lifted donkey’s years ago, someday the siege will be over, the torture centres will disappear; these days the TV broadcasts nothing but popular music and idle chatter, the newspapers are full of tittle-tattle, the President spends his time taking pleasure cruises, life is perfect, but the old reflexes remain, the people of Algiers still live in fear. Lies terrify them as much as truth. Cars raced along suddenly deserted streets. Silence and the stench of death descended upon Algiers, rolling out towards the city ramparts.

  We got back to the neighbourhood at about nine o’clock. There was no reason in the world that could justify two women being out on the street at such an hour. Rampe Valée is the middle of nowhere, a steep hill that scrabbles past the Kasbah to vanish into the suburbs, it is the far side of the moon. There were no taxis, no buses, and not a single streetlamp to light our way. It’s stupid, this habit we have of seeking out the light, it would simply make us visible to men waiting in the shadows. It reminds me of the parable of the streetlamp . . . the man who loses his wallet in the middle of a dark street but searches for it in the nearest pool of light. This is the absurdity of treating everything as black and white, you stop just where the sequel starts. Where did we come by the idea that light is always a blessing? Chérifa and I took our courage in both hands and plunged into the darkness of the labyrinth. I walked ahead, guided by memory. Everything is mapped out in my head, distances, bends, potholes, hillocks, walls. We were scared witless. There was not a cat, not a dog, not a rat to be seen, nothing was stirring, the neighbourhood looked as though it had been playing dead for centuries. Aside from our breathless panting, the click-clack of our heels and, always, ceaseless and mysterious, the hushed, distant pulse of the heavens, there was nothing: silence, stillness, emptiness.

  Dear God, is every night like this in our blessed city?

  Chérifa was no longer strutting brazenly, she was clinging to my arm with both hands, trembling from head to foot. Our little escapade had served its purpose. Rather than using words to persuade, it’s better to demonstrate and devastate. Robinson Crusoe would have been hard pressed to come up with a better solution.

  As I was closing the door, I saw among the wavering shadows of the poplar trees the figure of a man disappearing into the darkness. Could it be the same man I thought I saw when Chérifa first vanished? What can it mean other than that we are being watched? By whom? And why?

  Nonchalance has its flipside, things are beginning to look grim.

  As I always say: bring on the fear.

  The days passed, we went out only to do the shopping. One morning, I took Chérifa to the Hôpital Parnet for a routine check-up and, ten days later, we dashed to the post office to queue for something or other, to fill out answers to questions I didn’t understand. I don’t remember which particular law required that I present myself at Counter No. 6 to deal with some legal dispute. What legal dispute? Where? When? As it turned out, the writ was intended for a third party, some oddball who had dared to complain to the management about the service at the aforementioned Counter No. 6 and had been summoned to suffer the consequences. By some unfortunate twist of fate, the summons had ended up in my letterbox. Legal documents will be the death of me, try as I might, I can never cure myself. They seem to be drawn up in Cyrillic from the time of the pharaohs or the Arabic of the international Islamist. I don’t even take the time to check, I head for the hills. It’s hard to believe, but legal documents throw me into such a panic I don’t even recognise my own name. This is not the first time that Moussa, postman and general factotum of Rampe Valée, has made a mistake. There are days when he delivers his letters more or less at random. Now, I know precisely what his problem is, but he could make a little effort! Moussa was a postman of the old school, he used the Latin alphabet, he was proud of his peaked cap and his cape, he loved his thick clodhopping boots. As children, Louiza and I were in awe of him because he was always wrapped up warm and invariably punctual regardless of the state of the weather. I seem to remember that one bitterly cold day, we dreamed that someday we might marry him. He did well for himself, he got Christmas bonuses, his little calendars sold like hot cakes, and when he showed up we’d call ‘Hi, Moussa!’ and ‘Bravo, la poste!’ as he left. Then, when the seismic shift came in 1976, when every street sign, every road sign was replaced in the space of a single night, he did his best to Arabise in the few short hours allotted, but the edict caught him off guard, as it did all of us. Here I’m prepared to reveal a secret jealously guarded by the administration: he lied to his boss, who was also of the old school; between the two of them they could barely decipher half the new Arabic script; Moussa admitted as much one day when I caught him red-handed pleading with some scruffy schoolboy to translate an address for him. In the course of a single night, the streets had changed their names, their language, their alphabet. It cannot be easy, and sometimes he is overcome by blind panic, he feels as though he is in some foreign land, his guardian angel replaced by a fearsome djinn, and, terrified of being hunted down for treason, he pushes envelopes into the nearest letterboxes, all the while doing his best to look like he knows what he’s doing. He explained his dilemma to me one day when, fin
ding him in a terrible state, I gave him a full jug of coffee to buck him up. I hope that the old codger will escape the hornets’ nest alive, I feel an intimate connection with the insane.

  This was the only kind of outing I could come up with so that Chérifa could stretch her legs and get a breath of fresh air.

  The third time I mentioned it, she shrugged and went back to painting her toenails. I had suggested she come with me to the town hall where I needed to pick up some form or other that my bosses at the hospital urgently required. At the time, I was annoyed, but when I got back I congratulated her, having just extricated myself, dazed and exhausted, from another preposterous situation.

  Solitude can be brutal to those not armed against it. I have learned to make the best of it, I know how to fill my days with nothing, with silence, dreams, trips into the fourth dimension, empty soliloquys, outlandish outbursts and painstaking household tasks. I have active and passive moods and switch between the two as the whim takes me. I have my work, my books, my records, my TV, my illicit satellite dish, my little forays into the hustle and bustle of the capital, and my house which still holds its secrets. I have a window on to time, I know how to navigate its most secret places and drop anchor by its uncertain shores.

  Chérifa has nothing; to her, solitude is an emptiness, it is suffering, pain, an incomprehensible abandonment.

  What can I do?

  She scarcely thanks me when I pamper her, barely notices when I devote my time to her, as far as she is concerned it is completely normal that I should drop everything to attend to her every infantile desire. She is so self-centred!

  What to do? I talk to her as much as I can, tell her about my day at the hospital, enliven things with the sort of juicy gossip beloved of housewives. I watch the Egyptian soap operas through her eyes at the risk of my own sanity. I’m attentive to her needs, I allow her to interrupt me, to change the subject – something I loathe – I hang on her every word, I always maintain eye contact. Every time she sulks or throws a tantrum, I offer abject apologies that whittle away at my self-esteem. But still she sees nothing, she’s blind, I am no more than a shadow on the wall, something so familiar it goes unnoticed, a big sister who’s not much to look at, an aunt who’s a little soft in the head, a mother who is a bit embarrassing. I don’t know, perhaps I mean nothing to her, perhaps I’m just an overbearing landlady, an infuriating neighbour. The way she cuts me dead sometimes, the way she says ‘Get off my back!’ would drive even a clapped-out old car round the bend.

  When she starts a conversation, I’m so desperately eager to play along it puts her off. Too much fawning unsettles her. She gets angry. I try to patch things up. It ends in tears. Example:

  ‘It’s raining,’ she says out of the blue.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Can’t you see it is?’ She’s angry now.

  ‘I was just wondering if you had noticed.’

  ‘I’m not blind!’ she screams.

  ‘Sometimes people don’t really pay attention, we listen without hearing.’

  ‘I’m not deaf!’

  ‘I was just saying.’

  At this point, she throws whatever she’s holding on the floor and stomps out of the room.

  Does she even realise that I love her?

  How do you raise a child? The question popped into my head as I was going through a bunch of old recipes I’d collected here and there. Papa and Maman left me a basketful and I accumulated quite a few while I was growing up. Evolution being what it is, and the Muslim world being what it is, I had struggled to understand why girls were put upon while boys were fawned upon and wondered whether the hand of God or the hand of the Devil was at work. I quickly realised that our society does not have ears capable of hearing girls.

  What about me, how will I bring up this child? This girl!

  With other people’s children, it’s simple: we ignore them, give them a clip round the ear or smile at them as if to say: ‘Carry on like that and you’ll turn out just like your ignoramus of a father or your cack-handed mother.’ Or we find them unbearably cute and let them get away with murder. With other people’s children, we don’t have to worry about feeding them, clothing them, knocking some sense into them. They can be offhandedly loved, affectionately castigated, shamelessly forgotten.

  The problem is that Chérifa is neither a child nor a woman. Between the two, it’s difficult to know how to behave – we casually refer to girls of that age as Lolitas, but it brings us no closer to understanding them. Nature is fairly straightforward in its workings, it transforms us from larva to adult after briefly keeping us in a pupa stage there to eliminate our childhood dreams and fashion new ones. Sometimes, the machine unspooling time grinds to a halt and we hesitate as we wait for it to start up again; but I’ve noticed that some people, the foolish ones, cling to old dreams like rotten acorns, while others, the more enlightened, determinedly follow their star even in the blinding glare of noon.

  I know I didn’t much enjoy leaving childhood behind, nor do I much like what I see looming on the horizon. The future looks to me too much like ancient history, while the childhood innocence I trail behind me is a terrible handicap in this jungle. In the end, the problem is to decide whether it is better to die at our appointed hour or to live on through our ancestors. At first glance there would seem to be no connection, but I can imagine an explorer finding himself face to face with a sign reading: turn right and you will be eaten alive, turn left and you will be roasted on a spit, straight ahead a boiling cauldron awaits you. Turn back and you will die of starvation.

  Enough of these riddles, I have a practical problem I need to resolve. I need to make Chérifa love me, I need to make her understand that I love her, as my own daughter, with all my strength, with all my weakness.

  Where is the path?

  From one door to the next

  Hushed is the silence

  The wind has nothing worthwhile to report

  The crowd is running on empty

  The nightmare draws out its shadow

  My heart aches.

  To say I love you to the walls

  And hearken for an answer

  Beggars reason.

  Where can it be, the path

  Which from the unknown

  Will fashion my native soil

  My love, my life

  And my death?

  Suddenly, I have begun to dread coming back to this house. This is new only yesterday I would be halfway home before I’d even left the Hôpital Parnet. In my haste, I would rip my white coat. This house is my haven, my personal history, my life. One question nags at me, unsettles me, slows my pace. It worries me. The answer, I know, will be there when I get home, Chérifa will be slumped in front of the TV, flicking through the channels or counting her toes, or she’ll have taken off without so much as a note – she can’t write, cannot even formulate thought, so alien is writing to her – and yet still I come back here, one moment fretting and fearing the worst and the next hoping for the best, I cling to that thought though it does not seem to put an end to the agonising uncertainty. At times, I walk more slowly, at times more quickly, and here and there in the twisting alleyways that irrigate this city I allow myself to be buttonholed by the women who wait on their doorsteps, I stop and take the time to give them the latest news about their case. They listen to me, beating their breasts or covering their faces with their hands, stammering oh and ah. There are times when I find this gesture infuriating, when I see it as an abdication of responsibility, a thoroughly masculine cowardice; sometimes I browbeat them to the point where I fear for their lives and sometimes my heart bleeds and so I give them news that will have them singing and dancing all night. Dear God, how tenuous their life is, it hangs by a thread, a word, a glimmer, a law. And how absurd my own life.

  Chérifa is bored. I’ve noticed that she’s become less voluble, less frivolous; she is brooding, preoccupied, serious. I scarcely recognise her. She is like a caged bird that has forgotten how to sing, t
o splash in its bath, to hop and skip for joy – a joy it can scarcely remember, one too distant and too fleeting to gladden the heart. Chérifa is like a living doll, in her glassy eyes there is a faraway look; are they staring at the bars or past them to a distant something that glimmers in the sky, rustles in the wind, sings in the trees? I’m reminded of the story of the man who was born blind and who, one day, for a fraction of a second, recovers his sight – a miracle – and in that second he sees a sleek, handsome rat scurry along the wall. And ever after, when something is being described to him, he asks, awestruck and anxious: ‘Does it look like the rat?’

  The honeymoon period is over: our chats, our games, our rambles through the winding passageways of the house in search of some forgotten ghost no longer leave Chérifa spellbound, open-mouthed, eyes shining. I’m almost tempted to tell her the story of M. Seguin’s goat being eaten by the big bad wolf, but that might reawaken the nomad in her and if I opened the door, would she even be able to resist the call of the sea long enough to say goodbye? The thing is, I’ve grown attached to her; the only solitude I can imagine now is in her company. Dear Lord, how much do our lives truly belong to us?

  Something has changed in her, I can feel it, I can sense it. What did I do? What has happened to her?

  Pregnancy – of course! – and all the upheaval that entails. The swollen body, the leaden legs, the hot flushes, the swirl of hormones, the mood swings, the sudden cravings that affect the very core of one’s being. I’ve seen some odd cases at the Hôpital Parnet, women who chew their fingers, gnawing the bone down to the marrow, others who tear their hair, there are even women who stare at the ceiling like saints, oblivious to the hustle and bustle, to the midwives, to the cheeping of the chicks and the silences of the angels; there are the women who hit out at the nurses, lash out at their husbands, their brothers. There are the stately, old-fashioned princesses who come to us by chance or out of the goodness of their hearts; we crowd around to admire them, cajole and flatter them, but there is nothing to be done about their delusions, they are not of this world; with an imperious wave they brush us away like insignificant germs. They are difficult to deal with, the very fact that they are carrying the family heir means they are constantly in a state. There are the mother hens, feathery as eiderdowns, who amble between the cubicles pecking at each other; life does not bother them, they love the chaos, they love the crowing, they are always in good spirits. No sooner have they laid this baby in a manger than they are back to bustling about the house, clucking all the while. Every woman who comes to us has her own story, none of them banal. Then there are other problems, and God knows Chérifa has her share: youth, inexperience, vain hopes, bad dreams and I don’t know what else, her mood swings, her wilfulness, those things she has inherited. She is volatile, fierce and aggressive one minute, dazed and sullen the next. Love and sex and all the bother and the upset that goes with them, they destroy, they damage, they scar. Chérifa is young, she’s wild, she can’t resist the lure of the sensual. I have long since left behind the agonies of desire but there was a time when I too rolled around on the floor like an addict in withdrawal.