Harraga
Page 22
I kissed Sister Anne, I cradled little Louiza in my arms and I climbed back into the taxi. Before it disappeared around the first bend, I glanced back to that place, that convent, where I had just been born. The nuns waved us off cheerfully but I knew, I could sense, that in fact they were crying their hearts out.
To Bluebeard at his window, quivering with joy, like a hunchback dancing a jig, I sent the silent thought: Oh, Bluebeard, Sister Anne was right, Chérifa has come back to us! I felt inspired, Sister Anne really exists. I should bring Louiza over to visit the old hermit and tell him it’s Chérifa, wasted away from all her running around. At his age, he’s bound to be half-blind so he’d probably believe it. And when she smiled at him, he’d have a stroke.
On the way back, the gallant and dangerous cab driver didn’t say a word, or perhaps he muttered to himself but I heard nothing, not even the sound of his rattletrap leaking oil; I was beyond the reach of the diatribes that he and his kind liked to spout, I was already dreaming of a new world.
Louiza, my child
When a new sun rises
Upon your first smile
We will take to the road
We will become harragas.
Louiza, my love
We will leave our misfortunes
And wash away our memories
In the first river we find
As harragas do.
Louiza, my darling
We will travel roads unknown
And watch where flowers grow
Where birds go
As harragas do.
Louiza, my heart
We will find way enough and time
We will learn to live
We will learn to laugh
As harragas dream.
Louiza, my life
When the sun shall rise
On your first spring
We will be far away
As harragas go.
My child
My love
My heart, my life
Like your mother, my daughter
We two will be harragas.
Written in Rampe Valée, in 2002,
in the house of the Good Lord
(for that is now its name).
A Note on the Author
Boualem Sansal (b. 1949) is the author of six novels and various other books. His first novel Le Serment des barbares (The Barbarians’ Oath) won the 1999 Prix du Premier Roman. In 2003 he was dismissed from the civil service for criticising the Algerian government. Since the publication in 2006 of Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes (Poste restante: Letter of anger and hope to my compatriots) his books have been banned in his own country. Today he is considered not only one of Algeria’s most important writers, but also a literary figure of international stature. Le Village de l’allemand (translated into English as The German Mujahid) won France’s Grand Prix RTL LIRE 2008 and Belgium’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie 2008. In 2011 he was awarded the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize and in 2012 the Prix du Roman Arabe, but this prize money was withdrawn, despite protests from the jury, following his visit to Israel to speak at the Jerusalem Writers Festival. He lives in Boumerdès, near Algiers, with his wife.
By the Same Author
The German Mujahid
A Note on the Translator
Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations from the French, including the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder. He is also the translator from the Spanish of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory, Miguel Figueras’s Kamchatka and Carlos Acosta’s Pig’s Foot. In 2014 he was awarded the Valle Inclán Prize for his translation of Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour.
Copyright © 2005 Éditions Gallimard
English translation copyright 2014 by Frank Wynne
First published in France by Éditions Gallimard
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eISBN: 978-1-62040-226-9
First published in the United States in 2015
This electronic edition published in January 2015
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