Harraga

by Boualem Sansal

  Chérifa imposed herself on Scheherazade, a seven-month swollen belly commands respect. But Chérifa did not change her ways. A few days later, she showed up with a clueless journalist who had a pen tucked behind his ear and a newspaper tucked under his arm. Scheherazade, who has a mouthful of peculiar expressions from her part of the country, dispatched him quickly: ‘A skinny little runt who wouldn’t need to catch a sheep to play knucklebones.’ The handover between policeman and journalist did not go well, there was a punch-up and the newshound found himself in hospital with cuts and contusions. The following day, the front-page story in his newspaper read: Our star reporter K.M. suffered a savage beating from police officers as a result of his hard-hitting investigation into the misconduct of Inspector H.B., who has been implicated in a major arms-dealing racket with the Islamist maquis. Scheherazade showed me a press clipping. What a story!

  The authorities’ response came the following day via the pages of the government daily El Moudjahid (The Holy Warrior), from which Truth spills out over the country. Under the banner headline there is journalism and then there is journalism, it reads: It has been discovered that Monsieur K.M., a disgrace to a profession that has done so much for democracy, is involved in drug trafficking on a vast scale in collaboration with a certain sister country whose hatred for our homeland is matched only by its vicious oppression of the heroic Saharan people engaged in a legitimate struggle for independence recognised by the international community, and with certain groups in Algiers known for their pathological greed and their contempt for the extraordinarily progressive policy initiated by the President of the Republic. When challenged by the heroic Inspector H.B., the suspect attempted to corrupt the officer, offering him the services of a prostitute known to the police, a certain C.D., however the gallant officer, a man of irreproachable morals, flatly refused. Concerned by the seriousness of the facts alleged, and alarmed at the effects on law and order, the Public Prosecutor immediately issued a warrant for the arrest of Monsieur K.M. and ordered a search of the newspaper’s offices. The case continues.

  What has Morocco got to do with any of this? And what, precisely, has the President’s policy achieved? God, how these people love things to be complicated!

  The university campus witnessed a brief war of attrition between the press and the police, and then everything went back to normal, the journalist vanished without trace, the newspaper was shut down, the offices auctioned off and the editor got two years’ hard labour. While they were about it, the police interrogated and tortured a few other journalists as a precaution. The inspector was not forgotten in all this chaos: he received a promotion.

  Chérifa, having brought disgrace on the university halls of residence, was formally requested to leave the premises. There was nothing else the girls could do, their exams were looming, their parents were panicking and visiting more often. This was no time for jokes.

  Chérifa wandered the city for a while before hooking up with the pilot in a café next door to the offices of Air Algérie. Scheherazade caught a glimpse of him behind the wheel of his magnificent car when the runaway returned to campus to collect her belongings. Fortysomething and with a little paunch, the pilot looked quite dapper and seemed to be a cheerful character. Scheherazade thought she heard the shameless hussy refer to him as ‘Rachid’.

  Their goodbyes were minimal, since the little madam is incapable of saying good morning or goodnight.

  Since then, there had been no news. Had she taken the train? Had she gone back to Oran? Is she somewhere else and, if so, where?

  Curtain. End of drama. Now, I could let myself weep.

  Who would have believed that I, Lamia, a paediatrician, a strong-minded, intelligent woman, oblivious to everyday contingencies and immune to sentimentality, would be turning my life upside down for the sake of a little country girl who’s become a scarlet woman! I was filled with a curious feeling. Guilt? That’s certainly part of it, I smothered her and she ran away. Telling her she needed to be educated was another mistake, it made her feel a fool, cut off from the world. Anger, the resentment that comes from failure, from . . .? Not just that, rage, a desire to . . . It’s envy, pure mother-daughter envy! Yes, I suppose. Chérifa is happy to give her all to the first man who comes along, and yet I love her, I offered her my life, my home, and she refuses even to grace me with her presence. Not a single visit, not a phone call, not even a message. It’s stupid, it’s pathetic to get involved in such idiotic relationships.

  What was it that I called her, what was the word I spat in her face when all she wanted was a smile, a glance, a hug?

  I give up. I’ve already given her everything I had to give!

  Louiza and Sofiane left me with deep scars, Chérifa ripped my heart out. It’s not fair. I’m done with it, I need to move on. I am not going to let this haunt me to my dying day.

  ‘So, tell me, my dear Scheherazade, do you really miss that lunatic so much that you’ve come all the way to Rampe Valée? Isn’t that a little like something out of a fairytale?’

  ‘We’re very fond of her . . . um . . . we . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, um . . .’

  ‘I get it.’

  We’re all in the same boat; like me, the girls at the university are filling an emptiness in their lives. Apart from their textbooks and their notebooks, they have nothing that makes them feel human. Their lives at the university felt hollow, formless, a prelude to their lives as women, a shadowgraph, a mere outline; they were hardworking, diligent, dutiful, submissive, slaves to timetables and rituals, and Chérifa, naive and happy-go-lucky, came along and challenged everything. In discovering our innermost dreams, we do not emerge unscathed. And, being women, we have too many dreams.

  Scheherazade abruptly got to her feet. The night porter was about to begin his shift and would discover she was absent at roll-call. After six pm, the price of his silence is exorbitant.

  She promised to come back and see me.

  Algiers airport is unlike any in the world. All the dangerous contraptions the commercial aviation industry has devised ever since Icarus first flew too close to the sun are to be found there. With all its junk and all its gaping wounds I can’t understand how it’s still standing. The building is all splints and plasters. It’s a miracle the planes still remember how to fly. I had a knot in my stomach as I stepped inside this beleaguered world that looks like a national disaster and where a sizeable subset of humanity rushes, shrieks, weeps, jostles and gesticulates. After several collisions and copious sweating, I found myself standing in front of a breeze-block barrier next to the public lavatories, a mouldering area where the ambient temperature was several hundred degrees. Above the low wall a cardboard sign suspended from the ceiling was emblazoned in red with the words Bienvenu, Information in twelve different languages (or simply repeated twelve times). I stepped forward. Behind the counter, a phalanx of bungling idiots were playing a game a little like ‘Battleships’. The aim is to destroy the maximum number of planes with the minimum number of bombs in the shortest possible time. Brazenly, I addressed them, but they spoke a language I could not quite place, something gruff, halting, punctuated by sprays of black spittle and accompanied by threatening gestures. Nearby, sitting cross-legged on blocks of wood, girls wearing pagnes and bonnets were shelling peas, grinding millet or knitting mittens. They were not happy, something is bothering them so they adopt the pose of scorned lovers. I often prefer to view things and people through a distorting prism, I find it makes them easier to understand, they prove to be different to how they appear. The leader of this tribe, easily identifiable by her headdress, her sceptre and a fine collection of pendants dangling from her neck, her ears, even her navel, looked daggers at me, but when I explained that I had not come to disturb their glorious rituals but to see my cousin Rachid, a pilot, about a family matter of the utmost importance, she flashed me a lewd smile. I was treated to a volley of crude sniggers and a barrage of innuendo. Rachid clearly has somethin
g of a reputation among his fellow pilots who envy him and covet his many ‘cousins’. I squeezed my eyes closed and imagined them all being strangled by King Kong and, emerging from this therapy, I found myself face to face with a man in his priestly garb, a sort of evangelical minister with a firm but gentle voice. He had appeared from a hut behind the stockade. Beneath his penetrating gaze, I felt childish and naive.

  ‘What do you want, woman?’

  I was safe, this fellow spoke my dialect of Latin. I explained myself again, employing broken Arabic the better to flatter his eloquence and get the information I needed at a bargain price. The minister gazed at me for a long time, peered searchingly into my eyes until he could see the colour of my knickers, then he nodded, shrugged, bustled about behind his pulpit, scribed a few hieroglyphics with the aid of a golden flint, mumbled some incantations into a handset and in the time it takes to roast a lizard over a slow flame, a knight from an operetta appeared in full regalia whom I immediately recognised: fortysomething, pot-bellied, a cheery fellow, he went by the name of Rachid. When he saw me, impeccably dressed in my immaculate chasuble, he unsheathed the smile reserved for fine ladies, a solemn, sophisticated, nonchalant rictus that twitched at the corners of his mouth. Scheherazade was right, the handsome hunk was a miserable loser.

  I needed to quickly befriend him if I was to achieve my goal: to find Chérifa safe and sound.

  True to the dictates of his shallow, callous nature, he immediately attempted to seduce me. Usually, I am brutal with self-styled Lotharios who try to chat me up, but in this case I decided to be tactful:

  ‘I’m in a relationship with a sort of Bluebeard who’s planning to cut my throat, but if you want to try your luck in twenty or thirty years’ time, and assuming I’m still up to it, I’ll willingly give myself to you for free.’

  The man’s a chancer. He said, ‘You’re on.’

  Via a rickety metal fire escape, we headed down to the terrace café like a couple of travellers each with his own map. Panoramic views of the hinterland, lifeless suburbs sporting a shock of state-of-the-art satellite dishes, abandoned building sites with girders soaring into empty space and cranes slowly rusting, the motorway sweeping impetuously away with its miscellaneous cars and vehicles and, in the distant mountains, a raging forest fire. This is the ravaged, windswept landscape of Dinotopia, where bellowing pterodactyls take wing and tyrannosaurs breathe fire. The magic of the IMF has done its work here and we have been sent back to the Middle Ages filled with fearsome djinns and comical mendicants. Below us sprawled the airport, the hangars, the ramshackle planes lined up with their noses to the wind, the runway with its puddles, its potholes, its airstairs, its windsocks; the ballet of baggage handlers. I can’t begin to describe the strange things that were happening on the ground, light-fingers were fluttering and filching and in broad daylight. Oh, yes, and there were policemen, dozens of them everywhere.

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said, before he forgot himself.

  Though I know it all too well, as I listened to him regale me with tales of his conquests, I was reminded how intelligent imbecility needs to sound if it is to prosper. I’ve never heard the like. He’d met Chérifa in the café next to Air Algérie downtown. His heart had skipped a beat, the sight of a Lolita in distress moved our gallant hero. He had qualms, but he did what he felt was his duty. He is prepared to try anything once, and he likes to show off his trophies. He felt particularly proud of this catch: a pregnant, abandoned girl – what better? Good lord, he paraded her around the Great South, flying her in his rusty crate to Tamanrasset, Djanet, Timimoun, Illizi, tourist destinations for those of us from the Great North, sand upon sand in millions of tonnes, heat capable of melting stones, clumps of palm trees here and there to indicate areas of human habitation surrounded by the vast immensity and by silver-tongued men with sombreros and Toyotas who pretend that they have a timetable to respect. That little wretch Chérifa manages to commandeer bus drivers, pilots and army officers, while I’m having trouble making ends meet! Chérifa, of course, was delighted; she laughed at everything, marvelled at everything, was thrilled to see the white-hot sky floating above the boundless, white-hot sands and, between the two, the Blue Men, those magnificent nomads, trailed by gentle, gallant dromedaries across the rolling dunes. Dear God, I picture her there and I feel distraught, how could she have thought life in the desert would be fun? Then, of course, she started having pains, vomiting, thrashing about.

  ‘I can guess what comes next! You tossed her aside in a region so vast that people get lost inside their own homes.’

  ‘How dare you suggest such a thing! She left of her own accord . . . I . . .’

  ‘She’s not even seventeen years old, she knows nothing about life, she still believes in fairies, she’ll swallow any nonsense, but even she realised that you were the biggest cretin of all time. I’m just dumbfounded that it took her a couple of days to tell it to you straight.’

  ‘I . . . I . . .’

  ‘Go to hell!’

  Going to court is out of the question, Chérifa is known to the police as a prostitute and she would probably be blamed for the battle between press and police at the university halls of residence. As a woman, she has no rights, as a prostitute she has a lot of explaining to do, as an unmarried teenage mother, she deserves the death penalty. Godforsaken ignorant fucking bled! Besides, what judge would listen to me? I’m a woman, I’m a spinster, a troublemaker, I don’t wear the veil, I don’t own a burka, I walk with my head held high, I give as good as I get, and in the eyes of their infernal laws Chérifa is nothing to me. And I have no one to sign for me.

  I crawled home. Emptiness, which after all is my universe, exploded inside my head; I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t breathe. I ceased to exist. Everything I loved, everything I had dreamed about with all my heart, everything I missed to the point that I turned myself into a nunlike automaton had miraculously come to life in the form of that uneducated, ungrateful, emotionally unstable girl. Life tore through me like a tornado through a cave. I gave her everything, she rejected everything and the breath of life that her presence inspired in me has leaked away like air from a burst tyre. I was angry with myself. I was angry with her, but I also saw a kind of fulfilment in that fundamental imbalance, I felt both uplifted and reduced to nothing, a nebulous middle ground between the happiness I had finally glimpsed and the perpetual, unending sadness of our life.

  Where are you Chérifa? How far can your life take you when there is nothing to hold you back? Wherever you are, if you can read my thoughts, you should know that Rampe Valée, the haunted house and the heart of Lamia will always be open to you.

  It’s time to go home and get ready to wait; eternity is a long time.

  A bird is a thing of beauty

  But, alas, a bird has wings

  Which, just as they serve to alight

  So too they serve to take flight.

  That is the tragedy of birds.

  I was inspired when I wrote those words.

  Act III

  To Live or to Die

  All that is begun must end

  This we have known since the dawn of time.

  Already to speak is to be silent

  And to be born is already to die.

  What matters that God wills

  And the Devil laughs?

  Our reason for being

  Our incessant lunacy

  Is doggedly to believe

  In the impossible.

  That which is finished is invited

  To begin again

  And thus

  Living is possible.

  In my stupor I see everything in shades of grey, a shabby, squalid grey. The world seems a thousand leagues away, or somewhere off to one side, I’m not sure. I pass my days without seeing it. I remember that the world existed once, that as the result of some accident, some curse, some wasting disease, I have been exiled from it. I allow myself to drift, it is futile to cling to anything in a worl
d that is crumbling. I lash out between the falls, I rant and rave between convulsions, I pull myself together but it doesn’t last and the pain after the calm is more intense.

  I watch television the way you might leaf through a book in the dark, I listen to the radio, but all it does is buzz in my ear and when I retreat into silence a terrible roaring fills my head and turmoil crushes my heart. At the hospital, I manhandle the kids as though they were my own brats and their mothers tear them from my arms. They are suspicious of me, there are rumours of children being stolen, clapped in irons and sold at auction, rented out to beggar women, shipped off to war zones. Some are found alive, others dead, but most of them are never seen again. And once more I am faced with the Dantesque vision of a ­starless sky, a planet with no children, and – on the small scale that is my world in the arse-end of Rampe Valée – a house with no Lolita.

  How did I ever manage to live without my Louiza, my sister, when the absence of Chérifa is killing me? In me, the same causes do not produce the same effects, each time the result is worse. Either I’m starting to show my age or I’m sick and tired of watching my life draining away in torrents, Papa, Maman, Yacine, Sofiane, Chérifa and everything else that’s ebbed and gone: people, little pleasures, daydreams in the moonlight, even the kittens that purred on the sofa have grown into fat alley cats that keep us awake at night. Dear God, how painful this life is!