Khalil

by Yasmina Khadra

He gave me a forlorn smile. “To talk him out of it?”

  “It’s the truth. What would you have done in my place?”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

  “He was already on the bus. I thought he was going to Paris as a tourist. But when I hugged him as we were saying goodbye, I felt the belt around his waist. He got all red when he realized I understood what he was up to. I had to get on the bus to try to reason with him. But he wasn’t the Driss we knew anymore. He didn’t want to hear anything I said. I begged him, and I even threatened to alert the driver and the other passengers. He laughed in my face. Then he whispered, ‘They won’t have time to say their prayers.’ I couldn’t get over it. He wouldn’t have hesitated to blow up the bus, with me in it. I can guarantee you, he wasn’t in his normal state. It was like he was on autopilot. When we reached Paris, he took advantage of the crowd and got away from me. I looked for him everywhere, but he’d vanished.”

  I put so much conviction into my lying that Rayan stopped staring at me. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand again. I was looking for his reaction, as alert as a convicted man waiting for his sentence. Rayan curled up into a ball and stopped talking altogether.

  I turned off the faucet.

  * * *

  —

  I helped Rayan undress and put on his pajamas. Like a child, he let himself be pushed and pulled about. He was in shock.

  On his bed, rolled into a ball, he kept the pillow over his head and his knees pressed against his chest; I believe he was trying to smother something inside him.

  I fixed us a bite to eat.

  At the table, Rayan stared at the plate in front of him without seeing it, hands on his temples. Suddenly, he got up and ran to the toilet to puke. Afterward, he went back to bed.

  I scarfed down his portion and my own and then devoured a significant percentage of what was in the fridge, without managing to still the voracious hunger that was consuming me. I felt capable of swallowing the whole world. Like an hourglass, the more I filled my belly, the more I emptied my head.

  * * *

  —

  Rayan tossed around and jabbered in his sleep nonstop.

  I settled down on the sofa in the living room.

  The black television screen recalled me to the abyss of my spirit.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  * * *

  —

  In my dream, I was wandering around in the middle of a dark clearing. The surrounding trees were bare, their branches like scratch marks. It was a gloomy place. An ashen fog hung on the bushes. At the end of a heavily rutted path, Driss was waiting for me, naked from head to foot. He was thin, his face the color of dust, his torso gashed. Beside him, a boar, its muzzle open, sprawled in its entrails. I was cold. My feet sank in the mud. Driss smiled at me sadly. “It’s not joy,” he said. He showed me his hands, which were giving off white smoke. Suddenly, a bloody axe appeared out of the mist, whirling through the air in my direction.

  I woke with a start.

  Opening my eyes, I saw a shadow sitting on the windowsill.

  “Rayan?”

  The silhouette, which stood out clearly against the glass, didn’t react.

  I pushed away the blanket and groped for the lamp switch.

  “Don’t turn on the light.”

  I extracted myself from the couch and went over to the window. Rayan was contemplating the street, which was illuminated by a streetlight. Rain drizzled down outside.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I can’t get what happened through my head. Driss wasn’t an idiot. He knew the difference between right and wrong.”

  “He must have had his reasons.”

  “What reasons can there be for madness?” he cried, spraying saliva around. “We have brains so we can think. What’s evil’s evil, nothing justifies it, nothing minimizes it. A rational person obeys only his conscience. What did Driss do with his?”

  “He alone knew the answer to that. And he’s no longer here to give it to you. That’s why we shouldn’t judge him.”

  “I don’t judge him, I condemn him. There can be no extenuating circumstances. I condemn him for having been stupid enough to consider himself less important than other people.”

  “He sacrificed himself for God, not for other people.”

  He turned to me, his mouth all twisted. “You approve of what he did?”

  “Whether I approve or disapprove, what would that change? What’s done is done.”

  “Have you gauged the scale of the disaster? Driss wanted to kill people who hadn’t done anything to him. Where’s God in all that? It’s just barbarism. It’s cowardly, pathetic, sad…”

  “You’re going to wake up the whole building.”

  “I don’t give a damn. I want the world to hear me, from one end to the other. God’s not a warlord, much less the boss of a criminal organization. It’s written in the Quran that if someone kills a human being, it’s as if he’s killed all humanity. So what’s the sense of these wanton massacres? Why is it necessary to make people believe that the muezzin’s call to prayer is actually a summons to death?”

  “Watch out, Rayan, you’re on the verge of blasphemy.”

  “Oh, right!”

  “Completely right. You’re so angry you’ll say anything. You ought to go back to bed.”

  He leaped to his feet and turned on the lights in the living room. Then he came toward me, his pupils flashing. “I’m in my own home, not some boarding school dormitory. I’ll go to bed whenever I want, understand? And I’ll judge whoever I want. Nothing justifies what Driss did. Not the praises of his emirs, and not the funeral orations of those charlatans who have taken God hostage and moved into his place.”

  He leaned so close to me that I could feel his torrid breath. “Are you defending Driss, Khalil?”

  “He was my friend.”

  “He was my friend too!”

  “Then stop attacking him. He’s not here to defend himself.”

  “Why do you think he’s defensible?”

  Rayan stared at me for a long time. There was a little spittle in the corners of his mouth. His breath resonated against my temples like the hissing sound of a cracked pipe. We looked each other right in the eye. Rayan gave the impression that he was discovering me for the first time in his life. As for me, I saw him burning in hell, hanging by his tongue over a volcano.

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t go back to sleep.

  I was angry at Rayan; I was angry at him for thinking he was more intelligent than the thousands of brave men and women who were irrigating the road to salvation with their blood; I was angry at him for turning his back on his own people and trying to pass for what he would never be: a good—that is, completely integrated—citizen. Him, a mere assimilated outsider. He had no right to judge Driss, much less to condemn him. Rayan wasn’t even on a side. He was just an extra relegated to the remotest part of the wings. What did he know about religion, about the believer’s sacred duty, about the true exercise of faith? He didn’t even know why he was on earth. Because he’d been successful in school, he was convinced he’d triumph in life. Slaving away for a company during regular hours wasn’t enough for him; he had to work side jobs to make ends meet, without realizing that he was nothing but a trivial peon. His world consisted only of illusions, his dreams were nothing but death traps, his ambitions cardboard carrots. What does it signify to succeed in your career when death waits at the end of the journey? Whoever really wants to escape that must invest in something that will last and not bet on ephemera. Driss had chosen eternity. I was sure he was content up there, an angel among angels, bathing in felicity.

  6

  Instilling moral character wasn’t my father’s line. When he found out I’d have to repeat sixth grade, he clicked his tongue a
gainst his palate and said, in a tone that would resound inside me for a long time, “Even with an embroidered saddle on his back, an ass remains an ass.” I’d expected a regular sermon, or maybe a life lesson illustrated with striking examples and the names of people who started out with nothing and became celebrated and rich because of their devotion to school and concluding with words chosen to awaken me to my responsibilities, but instead all I got was scathing contempt. No blow, no threat, no punishment. Just a quick metaphor whose disdain doomed me, without recourse, to perdition.

  Driss had been held back too. His mother had wept at the news. She was a wounded woman, shriveling up in her convalescence. I’d never heard or seen her raise her voice or her hand to her kid. She took the blows fate dealt her with startling stoicism, unable to dissociate her son’s screw-ups from her own sense of guilt, persuaded that if Driss was unhappy, it was because she hadn’t known how to hang on to his father, an ethnic Belgian she’d loved with all her heart who hadn’t hesitated to leave her when she was eight months pregnant and take up with one of their mutual friends.

  “What happens when you repeat a school year?” I asked Driss.

  “Your parents feel bad.”

  “You think my father suffers because of me?”

  “I couldn’t say. I don’t have a father.”

  There was sorrow in his voice when he spoke that last word.

  Rayan came across us unexpectedly while we were sitting on the curb, twiddling our thumbs. The suit he was wearing had a glossy finish and he’d put gel in his hair, close-cropped except for a pretty strand that fell over his forehead. Being proud and handsome was his right. He deserved all the joys in the world: he was going on to middle school, his report card adorned with enthusiastic comments. First in his class. The congratulations never stopped.

  As a reward, his mother had bought him a computer.

  “I’ve got enough change to buy movie tickets for all three of us,” he offered.

  “And after the movie, can we go and see what Moka’s gang is up to?” I asked, because Rayan wasn’t usually allowed to venture into or even near the parc des Muses.

  “Why not?” he chirped. “School’s over, no?”

  * * *

  —

  A sunbeam woke me up. My neck hurt, because I’d fallen asleep with my head on the sofa’s armrest. Daylight flooded the living room. It must have been around noon. Rayan had left for work. I took a shower, made myself some coffee, and, sitting at the kitchen table, I thought about what I ought to do with my day. Trying to reach Lyès was too risky. The situation currently prevailing in the country made radio silence mandatory. The gym where the members of the charitable association Fraternal Solidarity regularly met must have been under close surveillance by the police.

  I realized that I still hadn’t resumed praying since my trip to Saint-Denis. That wasn’t serious. In the eyes of the Lord, I was a martyr. Though my mission had failed, my valiant intentions had been in no way compromised.

  As I brought the coffee cup to my lips, my eyes fell on the photograph of Rayan hanging on the wall in a silver frame. Rayan was staring at the lens with luminous eyes.

  You want to clink glasses with your bosses, marry an infidel, live without God and without restraint? It’s your choice. We made ours, Driss and I…Your mama always dressed you up, groomed you, wiped your ass. Driss didn’t have anything like that. Me neither…Have you ever been so far outside yourself that you saw yourself, really saw yourself, somewhere else? That you stood at a window, say, and looked out at the street, and saw, of all people, yourself, sitting on the curb across the way? I’ve done that. Every night, while my family was asleep, I leaned against the window like a specter and watched the kid sitting on the opposite curb. It was a hell of a sight, Rayan. A hell of a shitty goddamn sight. I didn’t even feel any compassion for the kid sitting on the sidewalk. I felt contempt for him. It’s terrible to feel contempt for yourself, you know? I’d wait for the kid to go away and disappear from my view. He didn’t go away. He preferred staying there, in the rain, mocking me. In the end, I was the one who would back off. I’d return to my bed and try to sleep. But how could I close my eyes when I’d stare at the ceiling and there I was, me again, suspended in thin air? I was the dregs of humanity, a fucking slum dweller with no future and no clue which way to turn, waiting for the dawn to come so I could run and remake myself in a mosque. And the mosque did more than give me refuge, it recycled me, the way you recycle trash. The mosque gave visibility and a countenance to the untouchables that we were, Driss and I; it took us out of the gutter to display us as luxury products in the show windows of the most beautiful buildings. That’s it, that’s the truth, Rayan. The mosque gave us back the RESPECT we were owed, the respect that had been confiscated from us, and awakened us to our own hidden glory…No, Rayan, no a thousand times, it’s not for you to judge Driss. You’re not in his league. Nobody’s in his league.

  * * *

  —

  Lost in my reveries, I saw neither streets nor people.

  I was a dead man walking, wandering in the fog.

  Was it Driss’s absence or the fact of having been left to my own devices that erased the world around me? I was so alone and so unhappy. I needed someone to talk to so I could prove to myself that the walls escorting me were indeed made of stones and bricks, that the ambient sounds had nothing to do with the diffuse thoughts rolling and bumping around inside my head.

  I felt as empty as a plastic bag swollen with wind.

  I wasn’t walking, I was floating.

  I’d thought about calling Zahra and asking her to meet me, but I was afraid she’d be under surveillance. My twin sister was all that remained to me on earth. I adored her, and she felt the same about me. We were so intensely close that she could detect the least of my worries. The rest of my family didn’t count for very much in my life. My mother was too miserable to represent anything in my eyes. I felt more pity than affection for her. As for my father, he’d dwindled into hardly more than a stranger. I didn’t like anything about him. He was the incarnation of all that I couldn’t bear.

  I found myself standing in front of Issa’s bakery—he was an influential member of the Association. He was serving an old lady. When he saw me through the front window, he asked me with his chin to continue on my way.

  What way was that?

  Everything in this town, where I had grown up without maturing, turned its back to me.

  * * *

  —

  Night swooped down on me like a bird of prey. I had eaten nothing all day. I took a seat in a kebab shop and ordered a sandwich and a soda. A group of young North Africans were talking about the Paris attacks and the psychosis that had taken hold in Brussels. They complained about ethnic profiling and excessively zealous cops. A tall fellow in a tracksuit was dominating the conversation: “So the result is, we get screwed,” he concluded. “I’ve got a high school degree plus some university, and I’m still severely unemployed because I don’t have the right face to work. Those raving lunatics have made everyone afraid of us. We have to keep a low profile and creep along with our heads down…”

  “I walk with my head high,” his right-hand neighbor replied. “I don’t see why I should hunker down just because a bunch of mental defectives fuck things up.”

  “They bring hchouma on us,” the tall fellow reminded him.

  “What shame? We don’t have to feel guilty for what those crackpots did.”

  “They claim to be followers of Islam.”

  “That’s what the media want people to believe,” said a myopic pipsqueak, wiping his eyeglasses on his shirttail. “Islamism isn’t Islam, it’s an ideology, not a religion.”

  “Farid’s right,” lamented a bald man, tirelessly digging around in his ear with a match. “Those nutcases are waging a holy war against non-Muslims. It’s only natural that we�
��d be singled out.”

  “It’s not natural,” the neighbor on the right objected. “Stop jumping to conclusions. Personally, I don’t give a fuck about those zombies. If it was up to me, I’d gouge the eyes out of the first guy with a beard who crossed my path.”

  “Hey,” a customer in the depths of the bar cried out. “I have a beard and I don’t pray.”

  “In that case, shave.”

  “I can’t. My face is covered with acne.”

  A small, skinny man who hadn’t said anything so far called for attention by tapping a finger on his table. “Let’s raise the level, cousins,” he said pedantically. “What’s happening is the logical outcome of a process as old as the herd instinct: exclusion exacerbates feelings, hurt feelings provoke frustration, frustration generates hatred, and hatred leads to violence. It’s mathematical.”

  “Violence against who?” asked the tall fellow in the tracksuit, getting angry. “Against you and me? Why? For a better world? Those psychopaths have made it worse than before. There aren’t dozens of solutions to this problem. If people aren’t happy here, all they have to do is go back to their village. They’ll find more mosques than schools down there. They’ll be able to pray until they drop dead.”

  “Here we go again!” the oldest of them replied, a thirty-something with a swarthy complexion and fingers yellowed by nicotine. “Why do you want them to go back to a country that doesn’t represent very much in their eyes? They’re Belgians. They were born here, they went to school here, they grew up here. This is their village. What you’re saying is exactly the kind of thing that makes them detest their adopted country. How do you suppose they can assimilate if they’re threatened with being sent back to their home village every time a sand nigger does something stupid? Ethnic Belgians never do anything stupid, is that it? We have to stop using this far-right rhetoric once and for all. A country isn’t built on its identity, but on its citizenship.”