Khalil

by Yasmina Khadra

  I didn’t know how Moka had managed to squat there.

  The interior was a shambles. Not a single object was in its proper place. The fridge was pushed against the bed; the electric stove was plugged into a socket dangling from the wall; books and magazines lay scattered on the floor; a crate full of empty bags served as a doorstop; on a wobbly table, the remains of a meal were waiting to be cleared away.

  “How long has it been since you aired out this place?”

  “It’s because of the cold,” Moka said. “I don’t have a heater.”

  “You could die of asphyxiation in this burrow.”

  He shrugged. “Bah! At my age, what more can you expect from life?…Make yourself comfortable. If you’re hungry, I’ve got some cheese somewhere.”

  “I’m going to provide our supper this evening,” I said.

  I went out and bought us some sandwiches in a kebab shop.

  When I got back, Moka had wrapped some bits of loose cloth around his injured calf. The cut was superficial, mostly just a scrape, but he acted as though he’d received a combat wound.

  “Young people today have no respect for anyone,” he said with an exaggerated grimace. “If they rolled over your body, they wouldn’t notice. I was calmly crossing the road, and BAM! there I was, on my back, all four limbs in the air. He could have rung his bell, but no, he runs into me full force and keeps on going like nothing happened. Can you imagine, me, a meathead? Ah well, what can you expect in today’s world?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for one of his rants.

  “Would you mind if I spent the night here? My father kicked me out of the house.”

  “That would make me tremendously happy.”

  “You’re not obligated, you know.”

  “My house is yours, Khalil. I’m in terrible need of company. I’ve got a sleeping bag that’s never been used.”

  He unwrapped his sandwich. Before biting into it, he furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I miss the kids,” he confessed. “Ever since some people in the mosque started spreading the rumor that I was a pervert, none of the boys wants to spend any time with me.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “What bothers me a lot is that nobody defended me. Most of the beards at the mosque used to be my kids. They know I’m not a pedophile. They liked my stories, they would ask me to repeat them…”

  To change the subject, I asked him, “Have you read all these books?”

  “Where do you think I came up with all those adventures I used to tell you about?”

  He reached for a box, took out some chunks of gingerbread, and offered them to me: “They’re from Mireille Oster’s shop in Strasbourg. A total delight. Kacem sent them to me from there.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich before adding, “Kacem would have defended me. Sometimes he even sends me a little money…I’m proud of that kid. Now he’s a European deputy’s assistant, did you know that? And can you believe it? Nobody ever thought he’d amount to much.”

  “He’s only a gofer. His function consists in getting coffee for his boss and holding his umbrella.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I didn’t answer. To tell the truth, I had no idea who Kacem was.

  I took a seat in a burst armchair, disturbing an enormous cockroach that ran and took refuge under an old radio.

  “Why are they spreading such hideous rumors about me at the mosque? I love those kids like they were my own sons. Is it a crime to love children?”

  “It’s not a crime.”

  “The real crime is what they do to those kids at the mosque.”

  “You haven’t been to the mosque, Moka. You can’t know what they do there. You see? You too, you incriminate people without knowing them.”

  He made a weary gesture with his hand. “You’re right,” he said. “People say anything about anybody nowadays. Things were better before, in the good old days, admit it.”

  “We were too little to suspect the nastiness of the world.”

  “I disagree. Horrors weren’t the only thing you heard about back then. People greeted one another, they asked after one another and their families. Today, people can pass in front of a funeral procession and not even stop.”

  He took a half-empty bottle of soda from the refrigerator and turned to me: “When I think about Driss, it makes me sick. He was your pal. Did you know what he was getting ready to do?…Of course you didn’t. No one imagined that he was capable of such a horror.”

  Without drinking or pouring out any of the bottle’s contents, he put it back in the fridge. More and more creases were lining his forehead. “No matter how I try, I can’t understand why he did that.”

  “We all have our duty, Moka.”

  He shook his head. “Our duty, Khalil, is to live and let live. There’s nothing more precious than life, and no one has the right to lay a finger on it.”

  “Do you remember Amadou, the little black guy from rue de la Flûte Enchantée?”

  “Of course. Haven’t seen him around recently. You’ve got some news about him?”

  “He died in a car crash, driving a stolen vehicle with the police right behind him. I ask myself what might have become of him if his heart hadn’t been broken. I’m sure he would have been an exceptional soccer player, and the big clubs would have bid millions for him. But he had to be cut out of the wreck with the help of a blowtorch. And you know why? Because of something someone said…one miserable thing someone said. We had gone to play soccer—we were, what? Twelve or thirteen? A big racist guard with a face like a fat mastiff refused to let us into the locker room. He was afraid we were going to go through the other players’ bags. When Amadou protested because he was one of his team’s regular starters, the guard smashed him against the wall and said, ‘Get your black ass back to your jungle, Chikungunya.’ Amadou, the best dribbler in the league, who used to dream about wearing a Diables Rouges jersey—Amadou was never the same after that.”

  Moka made a skeptical face. “That’s your indictment? It’s not very convincing. Dying in an accident and dying in a terrorist attack are two different things.”

  “It’s not a question of how things end, it’s how they begin. It doesn’t take much to cause a person’s self-esteem to sink like a stone. And when that happens, the harm is done. Everything goes haywire. It may seem ridiculous, but it’s the sort of thing that fucks up your entire existence. No one’s more fragile than a stateless person, Moka.”

  “Amadou was born in Molenbeek, as far as I know.”

  “The constant references to the color of his skin didn’t make him feel he was a Belgian like the others. Or Driss either. And the same goes for me, and for all the great unwashed who come here from somewhere else and get penned up in lawless zones and pointed at every time they venture outside of their zoo. People don’t pay attention to the disasters they cause with a few unkind words. The real criminals aren’t those who blow themselves up in the midst of crowds but those who have made the slaughter possible. So please don’t judge Driss too fast.”

  “You don’t kill innocents because some asshole racist said some stupid shit.”

  “Is this your way of kicking me out, Moka?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then let’s change the record. Yours is too scratched.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, my twin sister called to tell me that Rayan’s mother had dropped by to give her the things I’d left at her son’s place. “Where do you want me to bring them?”

  “I’m in Antwerp for two or three days. Drop them off at Issa’s—you know, the baker’s. Rayan’s mother, how was she? Did she come in to see our mother, or did she just hand you my things on the landing?”

  “She was the same as usual. She stayed with us a half hour, no more. We drank tea and talked about
our village, about Morocco. Things aren’t great down there, you know? And how about you? How did it go with Yezza? Did you call her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was she having a fit? She didn’t want to tell me anything—she said it was just between her and you.”

  “She’s going crazy,” I replied curtly.

  I went back to rue Heyvaert to stand watch. No police car stopped in front of the Turk’s store. In the evening, I took a chance and patrolled around the disused workshop in the hopes of running into Ramdan the mason or a brother. I hoped in vain.

  On the third day, I summoned my courage and returned to my workplace. I was tired of wandering around in a parallel world where nothing gave me any comfort. My boss didn’t make a scene. He swallowed the story about my sister’s attempted suicide and immediately pivoted to instructing me about the deliveries that needed to be made.

  A week later, a young man turned up at the furniture store. He bought a single bed, a night table, and an armoire, paid in cash, and asked me to follow him to his apartment to set up the pieces he’d just bought. “We won’t need to put anything in your van,” he said. “I’ve got my own. That way I save on the delivery charges.”

  He was a pretty likable kid. He seemed well educated, with his student’s spectacles and his close-cropped hair. He lived alone in a shabby apartment building at the far end of a residential suburb. He helped me unload the furniture into a little two-room apartment on the third floor and waited in the living room while I finished assembling the bed and the armoire.

  I was packing up my equipment when a voice boomed out behind me: “So how do you like your new pad?”

  That voice! It was like hearing the muezzin’s call.

  I leaped to my feet.

  Lyès was standing in the doorway, freshly shaved and bursting out of a red-and-black tracksuit too small for him. I hadn’t recognized him right away without his beard. I was so happy to see him that my screwdriver slipped out of my hand. Who said anything about doing without my brothers? What a load of crap. I’d tried to make myself believe I was capable of living without them, but Lyès’s reappearance had been enough to return my priorities to their proper order. My doubts, my fears, my frustrations went up in smoke. My heart was beating so hard it hurt me. I was no longer a wreck adrift—I was on course again, perfectly in my element.

  Lyès spread his arms to embrace me. His hug, the hug of a giant, nearly swallowed me up.

  As I held my emir close, it was as though I had happiness itself in my arms. I found there the smell of my people, their warmth, their contagious ardor. I was relieved, reassured, saved, fulfilled; I was all that at the same time, and I was sorry for having thought I wouldn’t miss my brothers.

  Lyès pushed me away so he could gaze at me. He said, “You look like you’re doing great. Apparently, you’ve managed better than the rest of us.”

  “Where did you all go?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “I was starting to give up hope.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I was completely lost.”

  “We were watching over you from a distance.”

  “It didn’t feel like it.”

  He asked me to sit down. I preferred to remain standing. The joy of our reunion dissipated at once. My weeks of anxiety caught up with me, loaded with the reproaches I’d chewed over in the well of my solitude.

  “You could have given me some little sign.”

  “I sent you Ramdan.”

  “Talk about an emissary. He couldn’t even come up with a decent place for me to stay.”

  “He put the Association’s workshop at your disposal.”

  “An abandoned workshop.”

  “It has electricity and running water.”

  “But no heat. I slept on cardboard boxes.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and forced me to sit on the bed I’d just finished setting up.

  “I sent you some money. You could have bought a heater and a couple of blankets…Look, enough, we’re not going to bite each other’s heads off over trivialities. No one’s been very comfortable recently. I myself holed up in various basements. Let me remind you, we’re at war.”

  At war…The night of November 13 flashed across my mind. The wailing of the sirens of Paris resounded against my temples, accelerating my pulse, stinging my flesh like thousands of thorns.

  I didn’t recognize my voice when I heard myself say, “The RER was packed. I would have caused a massacre. I busted my finger pressing on that button, but nothing happened.”

  “We know all about it.”

  “I don’t. I want some explanations.”

  “The sheikh will provide them in due course.”

  He signaled to the young man, who had remained in the living room, to join us.

  “This is Hédi, a brother who comes to us from Tunisia. From now on, he’s your roommate. You’ll have a lot of time to get to know each other.”

  “When will I see the sheikh? This story about the wrong belt has to be cleared up.”

  Lyès shot me a black look. He clenched his jaws. “You’re not going to turn that into an obsession, are you, Khalil?”

  “I can’t get it off my mind. You should have seen me in Paris, a city I don’t know at all, without any papers on me, with no money, and police barricades on every corner. I didn’t even have a knife so I could cut my throat if I had to. What would I have done if they had arrested me?”

  Lyès sent the Tunisian to get us something to eat. Once he’d left, the emir confided in me: “It was a teaching vest.”

  “A teaching vest?”

  “Exactly. A pedagogical tool. It’s used to introduce our apprentice bomb makers to the fabrication of explosive belts. Someone apparently stored it in the wrong place by mistake. It should have been checked; it wasn’t. Regrettable, but that’s how it is. The sheikh offers you his apologies. He plans to receive you in private and looks forward to turning the page on this unfortunate chapter.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible. The enemy is casting a wide net. They’re dismantling the Shâm network at top speed as we speak, which proves that there have to be leaks. Our group isn’t being disturbed, but we’re staying on guard. The mosques are teeming with spies. Informers are scattered all over our neighborhoods.”

  I took my head in my hands to think. But how do you think with a wasp’s nest inside your skull? The story of the wrong vest plagued me. Something in Lyès’s version brought me back to Ramdan’s, and I found the emir as unfathomable as the mason. We know all about it. How? Who had told them about my Parisian fiasco? Nobody except me could know what happened in the RER station. And just think, I was afraid of being taken for chickenhearted, I’d been waiting on tenterhooks for the moment when I could explain myself, plead my cause, wave the fried cell phone around like incontrovertible proof in the hope of being believed and clearing my name, and here they were, apologizing, regretting, looking forward to turning the page on this unfortunate chapter. Too easy.

  I felt Lyès’s stare pressing on my neck like a scimitar.

  I got a grip on myself and said, “How did they identify Driss?”

  “He had a police record.”

  “I wonder—”

  “You ask too many questions, Khalil,” Lyès interrupted me. “That’s not good. As for Driss, the services are convinced that he was part of the Shâm network. Except for his mother, none of our people has been troubled. There’s been no search of Association headquarters. Of course, our mosque is under surveillance, but there’s no concrete evidence to make it a high-priority target. It’s being watched on a par with the other religious sites.”

  I got up to open the window. I was smothering. The cold air refreshed me a little. I took deep breaths, inhaled, exhaled, noticed that my hand
s were shaking. The brutal transition from the joys of reunion to this deadly interview had exhausted me. In my attempt to bear up, I braced myself against the windowsill. In the distance, some hoboes in a vacant lot had lit a fire in a barrel. Upright in their destitution, they were holding their hands over the flames, like the damned at the gates of hell.

  “Whatever is wrong, Khalil? You’ve gone through some extreme turmoil, I don’t deny that. But does a true believer who was prepared to sacrifice his life react in this way? You’d better pull yourself together, and fast. If you give doubt a place in your convictions, soon the Evil One will invite himself to your table, and you’ll catch yourself eating your own flesh.”

  I said nothing.

  “Turn around, Khalil. I want to read in your eyes what’s troubling your soul.”

  I didn’t have the strength to turn around.

  Lyès seized me firmly by the shoulders and made me pivot. His eyes plunged into mine like some lethal probe. For the first time, I was afraid of that man, who was my childhood friend, my mentor, and my emir.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  I had to find a way out immediately, because my fate was no longer in my own hands.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “Do you trust Ali, the driver?”

  “He’s what’s bothering you?”

  “Who else? That guy’s no more trustworthy than a snake. If you had seen how he sped away the second he dropped us off in Saint-Denis. He was in a real hurry to flee the scene. When I called to tell him to come back and get me out of the mess the wrong belt had put me in, he switched over to voicemail. If the services nab him, I’m sure he’ll tell them everything he knows.”

  “You shouldn’t have called him, Khalil. That was contrary to your instructions. In any case, don’t worry about Ali, he doesn’t pose any risk to us. As far as you’re concerned, the authorities aren’t looking for you and don’t suspect you. Besides, you have a concrete alibi. On the night of November thirteenth to November fourteenth, you were in Brussels.”

  “You all could have found me a better alibi. Me, fornicating with a married woman, and the mother of a family to boot? It’s as if I really did commit adultery.”