Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  What can I do?

  It’s a fact, I take her out less and less. Not at all, if truth be told. Where can we go? Algiers is no place for a quiet stroll, it’s exhausting; women find themselves constantly followed, pointed at, harassed. The old men spout shrill scathing proverbs, the old crones make disparaging remarks as we pass, the cops wolf-whistle and stroke their truncheons suggestively. The little boys are the worst. They shout, they make obscene gestures, they walk behind us, egging on the crowds. It says a lot about their upbringing that hardly are they out of the womb than they’re waging war on womankind. The more I think about them, the more they remind me of the film Gremlins. What a story: in the dim recesses of ancient China (an antique shop somewhere in the heart of Chinatown run by a venerable old man more ancient than his antiques), an American explorer – half crackpot, half bumbling inventor but wholly charming – discovers a curious creature, a strange furry animal with eyes like a lemur and ears like a panda, a creature so adorable anyone would want to take it home. The man offers to buy it: it would make an ideal birthday present for his son. The ancient Chinaman demurs. The American lays down another $100 bill. Still the old man refuses: With Mogwai, comes much responsibility. I cannot sell him at any price. But the old man’s grandson rushes after the American and secretly agrees to sell the creature, warning the man: keep him out of the light, especially sunlight, it’ll kill him. Second, don’t give him any water, not even to drink. But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs, never feed him after midnight. These are the three commandments for anyone who would have a Mogwai under their roof. Our explorer agrees to these conditions and returns to present-day America – about three blocks away. Everything happens as it was foretold. The man’s son is delighted, as is his mother since she doesn’t need to feed or wash the new pet. And then one night, the boy feeds the creature after midnight, then spills a glass of water on his head in broad daylight. What follows is horrendous: the adorable Mogwai spawns a vicious creature, a Gremlin, which immediately begins to multiply. By the end of the film, America the indomitable is on its knees, besieged by these mischievous scamps who scream and laugh and pillage, eating and multiplying until they can overrun the planet and destroy it. This is a long-winded way of saying that I, too, felt under siege. It’s impossible to face down everyone and so you bow your head, you cross the street, you put a compress on the wound. Typically, the few decent men, the genuine believers, the humble fathers – those lifeless men – express their compassion by not lifting a finger, by giving the impression that there is much they would say if only life were not so short. Afterwards, they resent us, they are embarrassed by our misfortune which serves only to emphasise their own. This country may lack many things, but we have no shortage of would-be sermonisers, of lazy bastards happy to leave you to sweat, of pathetic cowards quick to fade into the background. What with me trying to look like a fashionable mother and Chérifa’s hip and glamorous clothes, we were an affront to the prevailing air of sanctity. We reeked of brimstone, of bitches on heat, of shameless heresy, our insolence knew no bounds. ‘Like mother, like daughter’ people whispered as we passed, squinting at us, pursing their lips. One day, I’ll tell them exactly what I think of their ‘absolute perfection’. Because they think they believe in Allah, they think that means they can do what they please, throw bombs and worse, sermonise from dawn to dusk, Monday to Friday. Is it my fault that Chérifa has the beauty of a fallen angel and I look like a Madonna? The streets of Algiers are dismal, dirty, choked with seething crowds, what is there to do but stare longingly through grimy shop windows and fend off rogues? It’s true I scold Chérifa more than I realise. She’s petulant by nature and I’m turning into a cantankerous old crone, I’m starting to lose the plot, I’m sick to the back teeth of the bled, I’m eaten up by worry, I’m missing Sofiane, I’m worn out working at the hospital. The compromises and cuddles of traditional family life are not Chérifa’s thing. And the best that can be said about housework is that she loathes it.

  If only she could read! My library is filled with treasures, the viscount and the saintly doctor left behind books enough to last us till the end of time. The others also left books by the basketful, but they’re potboilers, I keep them out of pity. Aside from a respect for the old, Papa instilled in us a love of the printed word that I have never outgrown. Everything else, I could live without. Over time, I’ve made my own additions, a handful of pearls and dozens of third-rate novels bought by the kilo and mottled with aphids and fly specks. I had to buy them in order to ride out my grief, to survive my time in the wilderness. I think I’ve probably read more books than a monkey eats peanuts in its life. The whole house is stuffed with them and I could get more if she needed them. But Chérifa doesn’t realise what she’s missing. For every single person on this planet, there is a book that speaks directly to them, that is a revelation, that tells them everything they need to know. To read that book – your book – without being forever changed is impossible. The problem with people who know nothing is that you have to explain everything, and the more you explain, the more they shut themselves off. They cling to their ignorance, it keeps them warm.

  I decided it was time for a spring-clean. It was all I could come up with to keep us busy. Chérifa shrugged. I was about to suggest a tactical retreat but it was too late, the young hate it when their elders go back on their word. We put on our battle dress, tucked our skirts into our knickers, tied our hair back with bandanas and then set off, full steam ahead. This was spring-cleaning Algerian style – slopping water everywhere until it seeps under the rugs, making a racket loud enough to wake the dead, whipping up such a commotion a person could lose her marbles. It is a continuation of domestic housework by military means, a complete clear-out; it is the tradition of the harem.

  This is how I learned to do it, this is how I do it, full stop!

  By eight o’clock that night, we had made little progress and the house was a disaster area. We laughed, we larked, we vied to see who was faster, we set each other challenges, we slogged heroically, we mopped, we swabbed, we dusted, but it was joyless and half-hearted. In the thick of spring-cleaning, it occurred to me that playing the skivvy in order to ward off disaster was the worst thing to inflict upon a girl in love. I imagined how terrified Chérifa must feel, now that she glimpsed the yawning chasm between the dreams she had cherished and the reality I was offering. But when you have nothing, what can you offer? Sadness leached into our deepest thoughts and by a process of cross-contamination we polluted the atmosphere. Our laughter was too loud, too forced, our conversation filled with too many things unsaid.

  Sometimes the defeat precedes the attempt, as it did in this case. When you’re waiting for the end of the world, all bets are off.

  The evening was pleasant, but it left a bitter aftertaste. It started out well enough, we were intoxicated by the whiff of disinfectant mingling with the soothing aromas of tea and Turkish delight. Lolling in our slippers, we began to drift off, exhausted from the big clear-out. I acted just in time, I put on a CD of Rachmaninov in his heyday to open our hearts, awaken us to the beauties of the world. A vast, sweeping, subtle music echoed through the house, happiness, rapture, golden dreams and carefully crafted mysteries. In this old place which broods upon its secrets, beauty produces ghostly harmonics. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Chérifa’s face, she was deathly pale, she was about to throw up on the rug. Great music is not really her thing, she didn’t know it existed, that it existed long before she was born. I put on some classic Aznavour, then Paradès singing fado that could level a granite mountain, then something by Malek, the Franco-Moroccan singer, then Idir, the Franco-Algerian singer, and seeing that even this was new to her ears, I slipped an old, scratched vinyl disc on to my battered old record player. Something recorded during Am Charr, the Year of the Great Famine, in 1929 or 1936. On the record sleeve, an old, tattooed woman sits cross-legged at the door of her tent st
aring out at the desert and written on the luminescent sky in a florid, cursive font is the title of a spaghetti western: The Whore and the Flautist. From the speakers came a threnody channelled from the bowels of the earth, one that would have put a herd of elephants to flight. The old woman, a famous cheikha from before the war with a rasping drawl, was lamenting the misfortunes of a young girl of noble birth abducted by slave traders and sold for thirty douros to an evil madam who immediately put her to work on her back. Straightaway we are plunged into pathos and misery. The girl’s apprenticeship was swift and brutal; the once beautiful, joyous maiden sank into a deep depression. Then the harvest ended and so began the orgiastic season for the peasants. Amid the fantasies and feasts, libations and copulations, black magic and honour killings and heaven knows what. The summer sun is sweltering. As news of the girl’s beauty and her doe eyes reached even the blind and the deaf in the desert, men came from fields in far-flung places to straddle the newest arrival. A brave troubadour who visited the bordello between society balls fell madly in love with her the moment he slipped into her bed. It is at this point in the story that the words of the chorus become clear: ‘Enter my friend, enter, higher still you’ll find my heart, it belongs to he who claims it!’ Thirty times the cheikha sings the words, heartrending whimpers from the depths of her being. She would not be more convincing if she were in the throes of death. The minstrel carried off the girl on a thoroughbred stolen from the village cheikh and so our lovebirds are caught up in a gruelling adventure, pursued by the guards of the monstrous madam and the henchmen of the notorious caïd. The tale might have ended there on a hopeful note, since to flee is in a sense a synonym for salvation, but no, the poet decided to follow heartbreak to its logical conclusion: the couple are caught, the flautist’s throat is cut and his body dismembered on the public square while his young lover is shackled and dragged back to the hovel where she will live out her days in untold pain. Since the dawn of time, the struggle to be free has led to tragedy.

  I had discovered this ballad among Sofiane’s belongings, it was just one of the curiosities he liked to collect. The young are only superficially modern, the slightest thing drags them back into the shadows of the past. And then I realised that the ballad was a bastardised version of the famous ‘Ode to Hiziya’, which brought our grandmothers to tears. At the first note, Chérifa fell into a trance, I mean a dance, listening to this cyclical rise and fall like a sultry summer that refuses to end, this violent, shuddering telluric rite from before the Gospels that abruptly segues into a bourrée of roughneck soldiers returning from war. I joined in as best I could, writhing wantonly, then passionately, in my chair, I even ventured one or two wails which went down like a lead balloon. Chérifa looked at me scornfully, I was ruining her rapturous trance. She looked at me the way someone might look at a Scandinavian tourist in Papua New Guinea who gets up in the middle of a ritual to ask the witch doctor how he does his tricks. ‘You don’t get it!’ she said disdainfully. That irritated me, so I put on music from my region, Kabylie music and rock from the mountains, and showed her how we shake our hips down Fort National way. Music so powerful, a person would have to be born deaf, mute, blind and cold to resist it. The battle had begun, between the old country and the majestic mountains, provincial honour was at stake and Chérifa and I both gave as good as we got. The finale was pitiful, we collapsed, exhausted, just before daybreak.

  I don’t know where I slept or by what miracle I came to wake up in my own bed. I thought I knew all the ghosts in this house, but this one had clearly been a stretcher-bearer in life, he had done his duty and immediately set off for other theatres of war. I shall call him Mabrouk. I saw myself somewhere, I don’t know where, in a dream, in some distant land, an island fringed with palm trees, washed up after some devastating shipwreck. With me were Chérifa, Louiza, Sofiane, Yacine and other beautiful, youthful innocents. There were recent friends, the flautist and his virginal maid, the girls from the university halls of residence, and there were others, acquaintances made long ago upon the journey of life. We were all naked as the day we were born or wearing fig leaves. We were dancing around a huge bonfire. Sweating blood and water, Tonton Hocine stoked the flames, operating a huge bellows with both hands while Monsieur 235 wielded a poker as long as the propeller shaft of an ocean liner. In the distance, a volcano was playing the tuba and smoking cheerfully. The earth was trembling just enough to heighten the rumba. Joyous minstrels perched high in the mangrove trees were strumming mandolins as though we were kings of the carnival. In the vast bonfire, people and strange beasts were burning. Whenever one of them tried to escape, we kicked it back into the blaze. I recognised the President and her sea lion, two or three skewers of gibbons wearing helmets, goats in djellabas, a single moray eel, the Wazier of who knows where, the evil madam, the infamous caïd and others, the mute parrots who roll their eyes at parades when they see the Supreme Leader of all Tribes strut past in his billowing bubu or talk about his days spent dealing with obsequious plenipotentiaries who come to show him some new model of tea glass. From a tumbril, the fire was fuelled with preachers and Defenders of Truth, bound and gagged. The inferno gave off a terrible stench which we breathed in in deep lungfuls, delirious with joy.

  It was a glorious celebration. That night I slept the sleep of a queen, though tinged with panic as I waited for the sky to fall, or for the ground to open up beneath my feet.

  The Moonlight Soliloquy

  When images of children came to haunt my nights

  It was always with two great silent eyes

  In an unflinching forehead

  And in those eyes that gaze upon the mischief of the world

  The mayhem of its godless revelries

  And the cold tremors of its mass graves

  I saw their souls floating high above the maelstrom.

  And their faces, radiant with a lingering light

  Announced the Divine Judgment.

  And always, in my darkest nights, those wide eyes

  That dauntless silence

  That deep-rooted pain

  Spoke to me of life

  Of its miracles, its mercies, endlessly reiterated

  Its unquenchable euphoria and the promises

  It makes in spite of all

  Our rancour and our wild excess

  Our hopelessness, our suffering

  Our heartless crimes, our treacheries

  Our baseness and our cowardice

  And the impossible loftiness of man.

  And, knowing that our punishment

  Is not grim death but dearth of life,

  I dared to dream I might embrace

  The universe within my gaze.

  Salvation lies in education. I have no intention of replicating the Algerian régime in my house and keeping this girl ignorant and dependent. In the long run, I would be tempted to shamelessly take advantage of her or I worry I might end up killing her. Teach her to read, open her eyes to the four great windows on to the world: science, history, art and philosophy – that’s my plan.

  My first task is to get her to accept this as a starting point. It’s not easy, the uneducated are self-satisfied, ­thin-skinned and terribly suspicious. And Chérifa is contemptuous to boot. She needs to recognise the extent of her ignorance, needs to be scared by it if she is to decide to learn, for her own good and that of others. This is what I need to do.

  I spent all week thinking about the problem, made some notes and came to the conclusion that it’s best to be thrown in at the deep end in order to learn to swim. I mean to teach. Dynamics will do the rest. Probably best to start with a guided tour of the capital. Algiers is not exactly a treasure trove of culture, but, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it’s often an encounter with a monument, a painting, a curious object, a sudden insight, a system of signs that triggers the desire to learn. I thought back to the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where an ape suddenly discovers all the possible uses of a mammoth’s jawbone and his descendant, six hu
ndred million years later, discovers space travel. I thought about Newton’s apple and all the other hackneyed tales we tell schoolkids to awaken their sense of curiosity. My awakening was something similar: it was discovering Doctor Montaldo’s medical books and his strange surgical instruments that first gave me a taste for medicine and for repairs; why should Chérifa be any different? Something will take her fancy and begin the incredible process that is the getting of wisdom.