Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  Dying is no big deal

  When living is possible.

  One elsewhere is worth a thousand heres.

  Misery for misery

  Considering the effort of the journey

  The pain of being wrenched away

  And the fear of losing one’s way.

  The pleasure of finally believing in tomorrow

  Is well worth sacrificing one’s life.

  Like the bird

  Like the prophet

  Let us spread our wings, shake dust from our sandals

  And walk into the wind

  Burn a path

  Somewhere in the world is the promised land.

  Suddenly, in my heart, I feel like a harraga.

  My door did not go bang bang, it went knock knock. That sound our doors no longer know how to make came to me like a divine breath. No one visits me except the local moralisers, the gorgon from the rue Marengo, and mad Moussa. I listen to them carefully, but they don’t understand, they just talk all the more. Then there are the officials who arrive on fixed dates hoping to take me by surprise, the meter readers for the gas, the water, the electricity, but they don’t count, they silently take their readings looking at us as though we’re invalids. I never dare to ask them about the charges for services never provided. Sometimes, trudging from afar, shuffling pitifully, the local tom-cat Missing Parts comes round to see if Minnie Mouse has returned home. He never says anything, he simply sighs as his one remaining eye stares down at his orphaned leg. It’s pitiful to watch as he contorts himself like a man on a high wire, vainly trying to scratch his missing ear with the stump of an arm. I fear for his safety, one ill-timed sneeze and he’s ready for the scrapheap. I’ve tried explaining to him that it’s pointless, that it’s all virtual, that Phantom Limb Syndrome means that though a limb is gone, the feeling continues for a time, it is persistence of sensation, a recognised phenomenon, it’s nothing new. I try to explain that there are better ways of expressing his shyness than scratching his earlobe or the tip of his missing nose. But I know it’s not easy to change one’s habits. I thought about bringing him to the hospital and fitting him with prostheses but I gave up on the idea; he would have to be completely rebuilt at which point he’d be even more at a loss. With a hook attached to his stump, persistence of feeling could kill him. I remembered the corny old joke: Tramp goes up to a tourist. ‘Hey, monsieur, I would bet a hundred francs I can kiss my right eye.’ ‘You’re on!’ says the tourist and stands back to watch. The tramp takes out his glass eye and brings it to his lips. ‘And now I bet you a thousand that I can kiss my left eye.’ ‘Impossible,’ says the tourist, setting down the stake and stepping closer. At which point the tramp takes out his false teeth and brings them to his left eye. Missing Parts could earn a living making bets now that he can’t work as a porter any more.

  Then there’s 235, who shows up once a week with his bus. He comes to ask if there’s any news, with a bus full of pilgrims in tow, furious to find themselves in the back of beyond. He’s really sweet, but he tends to forget himself and his passengers end up hanging around in the midday sun while he’s sipping lemonade and telling me for the umpteenth time about his saintly mother. He’s a good boy.

  My dear friends phone about once a year, always with the same cutting remark: ‘So, what are you up to these days?’ I always retort: ‘What about yourself?’ firmly believing ‘least said, soonest offended’. It’s always the women who don’t give a damn who come nosing around. ‘Hi, how are you?’ and they’re off badmouthing everyone in the neighbourhood. God, but the women in this country have got sharp tongues, I don’t know where they get it from. You could cut their throats and they’d still be gossiping.

  Knock knock! Knock knock!

  My heart was racing. I yanked the door open so fast I nearly dislocated my arm. It wasn’t Chérifa.

  A young woman. Twenty-two, twenty-three maybe. Dark hair, a slightly ‘so what’ air, jeans that fit her like a glove, her chest sags a little, she needs to rethink her bra. Dark eyes, lots of eyeliner, eyebrows like circumflexes. She’s clearly a worrier, she overthinks before she speaks. Sniff sniff. She smells good. Like me, she has her perfume sent from Paris in the diplomatic bag.

  ‘If you’re looking for Lamia, you’ve found her. And you are?’

  ‘Um . . . Scheherazade.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve come from Oran or Tangiers on the advice of my idiot brother Sofiane because, I swear, I’ll kill myself.’

  ‘Um . . . I’m from Algiers.’

  A beautiful voice, warm, a little husky. The name suits her to a T. She is the Orient that exists only in fairytales.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Um . . . I was looking for Chérifa . . .’

  ‘What? Chérifa? My Chérifa?’

  ‘Um . . . yes.’

  ‘Get in here right now and explain yourself.’

  From the moment my little runaway from Oran showed up, I was destined to meet people. Missing Parts and 235 were at the top of the list. It was because of Chérifa that Bluebeard lost his sense of mystery; these days I just think of him as one more neighbour to distrust. Now here is the beautiful Scheherazade come to tell me extraordinary tales. I’m up to my eyes in myths and legends. Scheherazade is practically a colleague, she’s a fourth-year biology student. She hails from Constantine, a town that died with the Jewish exodus in 1962, all that remains is a pile of stones and a few old men who lean against the crumbling walls pretending to dream of the beauties of the Mesozoic era and to know all there is to know about the charms of Andalucía in their grandfathers’ day. An earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale could not have done a better job. The few remaining women wear black feathers, she tells me, people call them crows. While Scheherazade describes her curious hometown, in my mind I am flicking through Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Swallows of Kabul. Her grandfather works in the rag trade, he imports fabric from the Sentier district in Paris.

  ‘Would you credit it? And why not buy from Medina or from Islamabad, after all they are our brothers?’

  ‘They’re old boyhood friends.’

  ‘I understand.’

  A wise man is a wise man, what can you say? Scheherazade lives in the halls of residence at Ben-Aknoun University, she has a tiny room on the top floor, building 12, stairwell B, which, over time, she has managed to make cosy. This is against regulations but the elderly janitor doesn’t know her or has forgotten her. She cooks, stays at home, listens to modern music and invites her girlfriends – some of whom even dare to smoke!

  ‘I know all about caretakers, my dear, I’ve hoodwinked my fair share in my time. The janitors at the Hôpital Parnet are ruthless, but they’ve never caught me out. I turn up on time, I leave on time, my white coat is clean and I always give them a cheery salaam alaykum.’

  ‘At university we have to bribe the porters, they insist on a tip at the end of the month . . .’

  ‘That’s new. In my day, it was more about the sensual. They’d beg us to show them our knickers. If you hiked your dress up to your thigh, they’d lick your hand, you could send them off to run errands, they would even lie on your behalf if need be. It sounds like they’ve aged. So, where is Chérifa?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing – I’m looking for her.’

  ‘You mean she ran away?’

  ‘That’s the least of it . . .’

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘. . .’

  We talked. For hours. Everything I feared had happened and more besides. I blame myself: by imagining the worst, I brought it about. And that idiot Mourad played on my fears at every opportunity: ‘Women are all the same!’ he’d say every time I got discouraged and gave in to despair. In this beautiful city, there will never be a shortage of men willing to speak ill of women.

  On the fateful day when she left here, Chérifa went into the town centre. This is where waifs and strays converge, the illegal immigrants, the unemployed, the tramps and all the little creatures tha
t the economic reforms have forced to turn tricks for 300 dinars an hour on the byroads off the straight and narrow. Here in the heart of the city, abject poverty meets garish luxury beneath the all-seeing eye of God and his representatives. There’s nothing to be done about it, even Hercules would wear himself down trying to understand the topography. In fact the place reminds me of Rachid Boudjedra’s novel Ideal Topography for an Aggravated Assault, the story of a Kabyle who arrives in Paris from a rocky peak in the Djurdjura and goes round and round and round on the métro, astonished by everything he sees in this never-ending tunnel only to finally succeed in getting himself murdered. He never manages to see the sun shine in Paris or enjoy the peace of its streets. Which in turn reminds me of Camus’s L’Étranger, which has Meursault going round and round and round in the luminous meanders of Algiers until he finally meets an Arab by a sand dune, can’t understand him, and kills him stone dead. The same tragedy, the same unfathomable humanity.

  A hundred metres uphill is the seat of government, though that’s not really what has people flocking here. A hundred metres downhill is the harbour, with its tubby boats and an army of freight agents afflicted by facial tics. A hundred metres to the left is the Commissariat of Police with its army of informants. A hundred metres to the right is the Kasbah with its inscrutable mysteries. In the shadow of La Grande Poste, in the middle of the square, is the one and only entrance to the famous Algiers métro which has been a boon and a nightmare for five successive presidents, twenty governments and two thousand utterly insignificant deputés. Ten times it has been inaugurated, and each time we believed this was the one. The entrance is a fantasia of pink marble and anodised bronze used to great effect. It is possible to go down into the station but the tunnel leads nowhere, it simply trails off into the muddy depths and the prehistoric magma. It sometimes seems as though from the bottomless ventilation shaft, you can hear people whispering in Chinese. As it waits for its trains and its satisfied commuters who, we are assured, will arrive within six months, the passageways serve as a shopping arcade for the local fauna. One person’s loss is another person’s gain. Here, luxury items are sold, dope, guns, forged identity papers, counterfeit money, merchandise which arrives via the port, the Commissariat, the Government Annexe, the Kasbah, the post office.

  There’s no need to look, everything is within reach. The place is teeming. Here the little people do their shopping far from laws and from harassment. From an aerial viewpoint, you’d swear they were free electrons, but no, they are controlled by gravitational force. The area attracts teenage runaways the way nectar attracts bees. They’ve been told that this is the gateway to a new life and that, as with any travel agency, there are endless choices of destination. Two hundred metres away, abutting the harbour walls in glorious confusion, stand the bus and train stations and between them, on a patch of waste ground, are the gypsy cabs, a riot of clapped-out rustbuckets, every one in perfect working order. ‘Direct from producer to consumer’ is a slogan from the socialist era, but it applies perfectly to the black market.

  The elegant women of Algiers also frequent the square; it is the only place where they can find perfume from Paris imported from Taiwan via Dubai. People say that at customs the sniffer dogs are trained not to smell perfumes but that’s just a joke the kids tell; in fact in Algiers there are no sniffer dogs in customs – if there were all hell would break loose. The elegant ladies turn up here dressed like paupers hoping to pass unnoticed but their pale complexions and their strange lisping accent give them away and prices are hiked up.

  ‘She came up to me outside La Grande Poste. I . . . I buy imported perfume there . . . you can’t find anything in the shops.’

  ‘I get what I need from Tata Zahia who used to work at the Union. She runs a little shop from home. It’s all good stuff, and direct from Paris, too, if you please! She’s a genuine trafficker, honest, friendly, she’ll even have a little chat over a glass of mint tea. Sometimes there are fifty people there and we have a party. She has a cousin who’s a minister and he supplies her on the quiet. I’ll recommend you. So, what happened next?’

  ‘I brought her back to my rooms in the halls of residence . . . I felt sorry for her . . .’

  ‘Did she have her holdall?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her clothes, her gear.’

  ‘Um . . . yeah.’

  ‘So how is she? I mean the pregnancy . . . is she eating properly?’

  ‘Um . . . yes. I couldn’t let her move in with me, my room is tiny . . . besides I need peace and quiet to study . . . and anyway, it’s against the rules . . .’

  ‘So where does she sleep?’

  ‘Sometimes my room, sometimes one of the other girls . . . we organised a rota . . . whenever she needs to move, we distract the caretaker. During the day, she goes for a walk in the city, and . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘. . .’

  Chérifa is slippery as an eel. After a week of doing nothing, of strolling in the sunshine, she hooked up with a homeless man who smelled of damp straw, he was succeeded by some useless cop, then an incompetent journalist and now, apparently, she’s run off with an airline pilot we don’t know the first thing about beyond the fact that he dresses too well to be honest.

  ‘We’re worried. She’s been gone a week now. The girls are really fond of her, she’s so happy-go-lucky but she . . . um . . . well she’s due any day now so she shouldn’t be . . .’

  They’ve clearly been charmed by the siren song of my Lolita.

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Track down the pilot, it can’t be that difficult, there’s only one airline in this country last time I checked. It’s called Air Algérie, right? We’ll just wait until he ejects from his glider.’

  ‘I . . . um . . . I don’t want any trouble . . .’

  ‘I’ll deal with everything. I’ll pop in and see him unexpectedly, the same way you came to see me. Did Chérifa give you my address?’

  ‘Not exactly . . . I had to search. She talked about you all the time, about Rampe Valée, the Turk’s palace, the Frenchman’s castle, the Jew’s shack, the Kabyle’s cave . . . I . . . um . . . I couldn’t understand why the house had so many names.’

  ‘It’s history, it’s complicated. So, what then?’

  ‘She mentioned the Hôpital Parnet, she talked about your friends, about Mourad, Sofiane, Monsieur 236.’

  ‘235! I’m not intimate with every driver who works for GAUTA!’

  ‘Sorry, Monsieur 235 . . . Missing Parts and Bluebeard, the gorgon from the rue Marengo . . . and . . . well . . . your ghosts . . . the ones in the house, I mean.’

  ‘Well how do you like that? A veritable menagerie!’

  ‘She’s very fond of you, and she really is very sorry. One day she actually went to see you at the hospital and she came back so upset . . . You were in a terrible mood and she didn’t dare talk to you.’

  ‘Let’s dispense with sentimentality for the moment, just give me the facts. So what happened next?’

  ‘. . .’

  I choked back my tears, I would have to hear this drama out to the bitter end if I was to understand.

  So, she had met some peasant in the woods next to the university campus. It’s the sort of place that attracts lovers trying to get away from prying eyes and radical preachers. Our two country bumpkins meet and realise they are kindred souls and before you know it they’re embroiled in some vegetarian discussion. They pretend they’re living in a commune, they draw up a list, life is beautiful. Their little game lasts a week before things turn sour. ‘He’s as much fun as a lizard,’ she said. That’s Chérifa all over, the minute she’s bored, she’s off.

  The next day, some other freak was trailing her back to the halls of residence. No need for binoculars to spot this one, the other girls knew immediately where this nasty piece of work came from. The dark glasses, the walkie-talkie glued to the ear, that swagger like a boat putting out to sea, t
hat arrogance that says you have the world at your feet and a Colt 45 swinging by your side, these are the hallmarks of an institution, the most important institution in this country: the police.

  Her new companion offered Chérifa a season ticket to the seediest parts of Algiers which, if Mourad is to be believed, are among the most stomach-turning in the solar system. Things move at a break-neck pace, Chérifa learns to smoke, to drink, to fight, to strike a pose and she also learns a new vocabulary. The other girls stop their ears and listen, the little fool dropped words like bombs. She would go out at ridiculous hours, come back at all hours without so much as a by-your-leave. The girls at the halls of residence couldn’t handle it, one by one they closed their doors to her. Young women from good families are more terrified by a whiff of scandal than they are by terrorism. The caretakers started to grumble openly, the rumours spread. Attracted by the scent, dubious cars began showing up on the campus. Before long the sticklers came out of the woodwork claiming that stranglers were operating in the area. I suspect this means the sermonisers and the Defenders of Truth. It’s high time we standardised the vocabulary, we can’t go on using different words for the same things. The problem is people stammer and shift and shilly-shally about anything to do with Islam. It’s like the Tower of Babel, people say stickler, strangler, cut-throat, Islamist, lunatic, fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist, suicide bomber, jihadist, Wahhabi, Salafist, Djazarist, Taliban, Tango, Zarqaouist, Afghani, born in the banlieue, member of al-Qaeda and I don’t know what else – it’s like these people had nothing to do with Islam. But they’re all basically the same person with different clothes and different beliefs. The specialists should at least agree on their terms, that way we would be able to have a frank discussion about the problem, but let’s be honest, if Islam is responsible for anything, it’s producing Muslims, there’s no way of knowing how they will turn out later, and there’s no after-sales service. For crying out loud, if people have children, they should keep them under control.