Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  The various outings I’ve planned will require about a week. I’ll arrange to take some of the leave I’m owed, I’ll get Mourad involved – we’ll need his car. The presence of a casually cultivated man like Mourad will add just the right touch of jaded sophistication to my plan. Studying is a pleasure only for those who are truly initiates, I won’t be expecting great things of Chérifa on our first day of lessons. More haste, less speed.

  And so it came to pass. Unfortunately for me, and even more so for the little airhead, the result was the opposite of what I had intended. If there was a click, it was the sound of a door closing. Chérifa is totally, utterly resistant to all things intellectual. The magic of knowledge does not stir her in the least. My explanations, Mourad’s comments rolled off her like water off a duck’s back without eliciting so much as a shiver. She was more bored than ever. And this was only day one . . .

  Dear God, what did they do to her at school?

  I had decided it was best to start at the famous Jardin d’Essai. A lot of people don’t realise it, but the botanical gardens there are as much a symbol of Algiers as the Bois de Boulogne is of Paris or Hyde Park of London. Algiers spends so much time bragging about its glories that these days no one visits the gardens any more. Jingoistic as they are, the citizens of Algiers don’t like it when their leaders gild the lily. Television fills in the blanks in our collective unconscious with archive footage, something that is obvious to anyone watching since the visitors to the gardens are too obviously wearing their Sunday best for this to be a Friday. The footage comes from the Algiers section of the archives of the long since defunct Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française. The gentlemen in these film clips all wear bell-bottoms and have a cigarette dangling from the corner of their mouths à la Humphrey Bogart, while the ladies in their crinoline wear their handbags dangling from the crooks of their elbows mimicking starlets they’ve seen in the movies. And the poor children look so well-behaved in their smart berets your heart goes out to them. This, then, was why I put the Jardin d’Essai at the top of my list – we would be the only ones there to admire this ancient wonder.

  It was a mistake, a fiasco; this little corner of paradise, like all the others, has been spoiled. Chérifa was not likely to catch the botany bug here. Papa used to take us to the gardens when I was a little girl. It was a ritual: the Algerian families at the time, fresh from the war of liberation, still clung to this colonial tradition of a Sunday in the park. Louiza and I would come back, our brains teeming with extraordinary images, magical perfumes, with burgeoning dreams, and immediately set to work on whatever composition we had to write for school. ‘This is all very well, Lamia,’ the teacher said when we had taught her everything there was to know about the gardens, ‘it’s all very poetic and so forth, but you are allowed to write about something else. And that goes for you, too, Louiza.’ On our first visit, we felt dwarfed by the majesty of the place which conveyed such a powerful sense of abundance, of wonderment, of uniqueness, of strangeness, of otherworldly purity that it blew our minds, our eyes darted around like malfunctioning lasers. My God, how could anyone read, let alone remember, all the names attached to the trees, the shrubs, the flowers? Back in Rampe Valée, this glut of information left our heads spinning for a week. Our euphoria attained frenzied proportions when we visited the little zoo nestled in the heart of the gardens. Oh, the shock, the indescribable sense of discovery! Oh, those roars, the growls, the trumpets, the cackles, the howls, the strange rustlings that seemed both distant and so close, the barbaric chants, the harrowing cries, the endless echoes rippling out, jarring, merging, overlapping, falling eerily silent only to suddenly erupt again in a different register. And that feverishness, those piercing eyes, the colours and the smells that made up the wild savage harmonies of the world, a melody unchanged since the dawn of time when we first filled it with our fears. I remember feeling my hair stand on end. All this was very different from the cats and dogs, the canaries and the other pets we were accustomed to. To my dying day, I will remember the magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains who lay dozing in his cage like a king in his palace. Immediately we were reminded of biblical tales so dear to Maman: I thought about Samson, the great strangler of lions, about Delilah, the repentant sinner – who, before she repented, had been an incomparable sinner. Watching the lion yawn, I could easily imagine that Louiza and I would fit inside that huge, gaping maw, even standing up with arms outstretched. I remembered us faithfully swearing not to leave each other’s side. A brass plaque informed us: A gift from His Royal Highness Muhammad V, Sultan of Morocco and Commander of the Faithful, to his brother Ahmed Ben Bella, on the occasion of his triumphant election to the highest office of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria.

  The inscription infuriated Papa. ‘An ass is an ass, even if he is a distant cousin of the king of the jungle!’ he said. He was thinking about politics. Papa liked to make vague pronouncements: ‘The worm is already in the apple,’ he would mutter sententiously when Maman reminded him that the ‘ass’ had been toppled years before and the man who toppled him was no more likely to prevail in heaven. Louiza and I were young at the time, we found adult conversations boring, at that age other people don’t matter. The only yoke we knew was that of our parents, the only ingratitude that of the neighbourhood trollops.

  No one visits the gardens, I said, but we arrived to find milling crowds on every path and trail and even the once sacrosanct parterres and conservatories were swarming with hordes of people so anonymous we passed without registering them, terrified pensioners plodding along in faltering groups, children and beggars dashing past, legions of wily street hawkers selling snacks, single cigarettes, digital watches, Islamic textbooks, aromatic incense (and other types of resin), posters of Bin Laden, Bouteflika, Zarqawi, Saddam, the Terminator, Zinedine Zidane, John Wayne, Madonna, Lara Croft, Mickey Mouse, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bruce Lee, Benflis, Umm Kulthum and I don’t know who all, it was a souk, there was something for everyone. The trees in the garden are afflicted by leprosy or maybe just by old age. The same goes for the shrubs and the crumbling arbours. Perhaps it’s the drought, Algiers is in the anhydrous phase of its climatic cycles, there is no water, the air is fetid. One by one the zoo animals died off. Some burrowed deep trying to find water, the carnivores devoured each other before they expired, those few that remain are afflicted by the blind staggers. I remembered a newspaper publishing a letter from a man so outraged by the park authorities’ neglect he had taken to watering the poor dying creatures himself. The joker called it a crime against humanity. It’s not exactly how I would have put it, since there is a danger of contamination between that idea and an underlying one. Every morning, he would make his rounds with his jerry can, going from cage to cage, giving water to each according to its needs. Exhausted by the task, the man appealed to people through the pages of his favourite newspaper. I don’t know how many responded to his plea, but chronic neglect has certainly contributed to the carnage: the place has an air of decline that is noxious to sensitive souls. Nothing saddens the eye like rust and decay and I have to admit the garden bears its mark, as does Algeria, a Third World country chasing its tail: these are the signs, the half-finished, the moribund, the half-forgotten, the endless restrictions, the sporadic bouts of madness. On this path, time collapses into nothing, space contracts and life is a self-evident abdication. Thankfully, great suffering carries within it its own antidote: fatalism – which offers many reasons to die in the shadows, with no regrets, without demanding justice.

  How have we managed to live surrounded by so little grandeur, so little clarity? I wonder.

  I gave the order to retreat. To stay too long here would finish us off. Under the arch of the monumental gates, Chérifa threw a tantrum that knocked me for six: ‘Why did we come here?’ ‘We’re just taking a stroll,’ I replied, fingers crossed. ‘Just over there is the Museum of Antiquities and Fine Art, you’ll see it’s educa— . . . it’s fun.’ Seen from without, the b
uilding is as chipped and peeling as a leper colony, but to hell with outward appearance, the interior might well be magnificent.

  As indeed it was. Though to realise that, you had to have eyes to see, something Chérifa, from the outset, stubbornly refused to do. Four thousand years of beauty, of unfathomable mysteries harmoniously cohabiting beneath dizzyingly high ceilings. They seemed to eye us scornfully as if to say ‘What’s that doing here?’ We felt insignificant, ugly, obtuse, in a word humiliated by the outmoded and inefficient ideas swirling in our heads. I saw Chérifa become rigid. At least she felt intimidated; that was a start. The vast entrance hall of stone and marble in the flamboyant Louis-Philippe style cannot but seem overwhelming to people like us who live in dark, sweltering anthills. Then, suddenly, in her eyes I saw the question that would cut my legs from under me and force me to abandon my tutoring: ‘So what did we come in here for?’

  The spell was broken.

  Heads bowed, we traipsed morosely through centuries and civilisations and nothing jumped out, nothing forced us to ask the crucial question: ‘What is that doing here?’ The galleries were deserted, they told of superannuated futility, of soullessness, of banishment. The paintings, the statues, the objets d’art, the gemstones, the engravings looked like antiquated curios arranged by pen-pushers exhausted by routine. The beautiful is beautiful only when one knows. We walked past without noticing and found ourselves outside in the sunshine, depressed, dazzled, tired, disappointed.

  All this is another world to Chérifa, a bizarre, artificial world assembled from the flea market of past centuries, past millennia. She stared at everything wide-eyed as an owl woken by a sudden commotion. I wanted her to understand that we had not magically appeared from an Aladdin’s lamp or some sleight-of-hand in a laboratory, that we were the product of these things that surrounded us, but no words can pierce a mental block. Chérifa has much to see if she is to make headway and I cannot do it for her. It is for her to decide.

  A hasty change of plan – we weave our way through the streets according to the code, prevaricating with the imponderable. Everything else – the Bardo Museum, the great mosques, the Ketchaoua mosque and the Jewish one, the Cathédrale du Sacré-Coeur, the basilica of Notre Dame d’Afrique, the citadel, the Palace of the Raïs, the Villa du Centenaire, the Cemetery of the Two Princesses, the Tomb of the Christian, the Roman ruins of Tipaza and the rest – will have to wait for another time, if one day the wind should change.

  We wolfed down pizza in a ramshackle hovel no worse than the next, swigged lemonade from the bottle and headed home by bus having abandoned Mourad – who thought he spotted some old comrades in arms – in a bar that seemed somewhat mysterious through the thick pall of smoke.

  I felt Chérifa draw away. She looked at me as though I were a stranger or a relative in whom she’d just discovered some bizarre vice. It was at that moment that I truly understood the meaning of despair.

  Education may well be salvation, but it is also the thing that most clearly divides people.

  Had it happened, this thing that was inevitable? This is what I asked myself as I turned the key in the door. Was this merely foreboding? No, there was a clear sign: a thick, heavy silence. That was unlike Chérifa, who surrounds herself with noise, all day long she has the TV, the radio, the record player or the CD player turned up so loud the walls are queasy and my poor ears are assailed. Ever since she showed up, I’ve forgotten the meaning of silence. The silence that greeted me now was heavy and impenetrable, but it was also unusual, deafening, glacial. I ran inside, I shouted, I screamed. I stopped and then I ran again, I ran faster, screaming fit to burst my lungs: ‘Chérifaaaaa . . . Chérifaaaa . . . Chérifaa . . . Chérifa . . . Chéri . . .!’ Then I fell to my knees . . . I don’t remember where. I don’t know how, but I found myself on the sofa, head in my hands, trembling and feverish. I felt a terrible pain as, on the horizon, I saw a whole tsunami of pain bearing down on me.

  Papa, Maman and Yacine are long gone, God called them to Himself, then that idiot Sofiane let himself be caught up in his own delusions, now it is Chérifa’s turn. She is nothing to me, just a stray chick who turned up uninvited, but the love I feel for her has made her my little sister, my daughter, my baby. What have I done to deserve this?

  Then suddenly I noticed that her clothes were still strewn about the place, under my feet, draped over the TV, the table, the dresser, the chairs. Where our clothes are, we are. Or not far off. I’m impulsive by nature, I always overreact, I’m my own worst enemy, I act first and think later.

  It was a terrible week, twice the little hussy ran away – brief flits of a few hours, but so nerve-racking they have left me wiped out. These are obviously portents.

  Like the fledgling that flaps its wings on a branch, is she preparing to take flight?

  Day by day I am discovering that our lives only partly belong to us. And there is no guarantee that the part we can control is more crucial than that part we cannot.

  She is utterly astounding, that girl. I would never have imagined that the dusty old douars of Algeria were capable of producing such a character. In the godforsaken places stuck out in the back of beyond, you come to expect ­anything – lunatics, neurotics, egotists, runaways, snobs – anything but this. These are city problems, for crying out loud.

  What’s worse is that I’ve got used to her little disappearing acts. The time will come when I don’t even notice her disappear and reappear, it’s like having a cat, you only notice it’s missing when you try to feed it: ‘Here, puss-puss-puss, where are you, you little pest?’, and when it finally shows up wanting food, it plants itself in front of the fridge like a carrion eater and yowls, ‘Miaow, miaow, open this thing for me!’ You end up wondering who is dependent on whom. It’s blackmail and I won’t stand for it.

  The way Chérifa talks about her comings and goings drives me mad. You’d think she was going to the bakery or coming back from the dairy: ‘Hello, a pitcher of milk, please, thanks, bye.’ I’m the one who is polite and apologetic, she is the one who gets angry, jabs her finger. Besides, there is no dairy around here any more, no milk churns, no cows, no goats, nothing, we buy our milk from the local shop like everything else, it comes in plastic cartons full of botulism. And the bread they sell tastes like soap.

  Getting information out of Chérifa is like pulling teeth.

  The comparison to a cat suits her, she disappeared last night just because she saw some guy tom-catting under the balcony – the same guy I saw slipping between the poplar trees after midnight the day after she first showed up. It’s reassuring to know we weren’t under surveillance, we were just being stalked! Phew! Well, that’s one mystery solved. This tom-cat lives in a nameless shantytown near Bab el-Oued between Rampe Valée and Climat-de-France, the neighbouring ghetto. He’d been hanging around when he spotted Chérifa looking for my place. I don’t know whether he suddenly fell head over heels in love or whether he took a moment to think about things, but one way or another, he clearly decided he had a good reason for hanging around the neighbourhood and loitering under my window. Ever since, this guy has been tracking us, slipping in the shadows, waiting for mektoub to tell him when to go for broke. Last night, he finally did.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. We talked for a bit outside.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We went for a walk around the block, not that it’s any of your business! He wanted to show me some of the damage from the flooding in Bab el-Oued last year.’

  ‘I suppose it was exciting. A thousand people drowned, as many more disappeared and God knows how many houses were swept away. So, what else?’

  ‘The poor guy, he lost his father and his brothers and most of his friends in the flood.’

  ‘That’s very sad . . . and?’

  ‘We went down as far as Sostara to look at the little restaurant where he threw himself on a home-made bomb. He used to work as a labourer down on the docks and he was on his lunch break. He
lost one arm, one leg, one ear, one eye, his nose, a . . .’

  ‘The poor guy, unemployed and disabled, he’s really not had much luck, but there are worse things, believe me . . . what else?’

  ‘Around his way, people call him “Missing Parts”.’

  ‘Charming. But he didn’t drag you into some tramp’s hovel to watch television, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘We did go to his place in Climat-de-France, he wanted to introduce me to his mother.’

  ‘He’s got some ulterior motive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. So how is she, his mother?’

  ‘She was hit in the head by a stray bullet during the attack at the Marché de la Lyre where she sells pancakes. She doesn’t get out any more, poor thing.’

  ‘So, after all that, did he tell you what it was he wanted?’

  ‘Just to talk. The poor guy is lonely, he lost half his friends in disasters and the other half in terrorist attacks. He says girls make better friends because they’re more likely to survive.’

  ‘If he comes prowling around here again, tell him that girl friends eventually end up getting married at which point “just talking” is almost as dangerous as sticking your nose in a grinder.’

  Chérifa wasn’t listening, and then stupidly she said, ‘I prefer guys, girls can be really bitchy, they steal your stuff and they’re always jealous.’