by Faïza Guène
‘…’
‘Dounia?’
‘What?’
‘Do you eat pork as well?’
‘Pork? You’re sick in the head!’
‘Dounia?’
‘What now?’
‘Are you going to buy me my pair of Stan Smiths?’
‘Fine, all right, I get it. So, here’s the deal, don’t breathe a word to anyone and we’ll go to the sports shop next week, okay?’
She gave me that conspiratorial wink again, which was starting to bug me.
Three pairs of years went by. Dounia qualified with flying colours and fulfilled her ambition of becoming a lawyer. Despite the tense atmosphere at home, my mother wanted to bring us together over a special meal.
Food, always. Her way of celebrating her daughter’s success. Deep down she was proud, even if, as soon as Dounia announced that she had been called to the bar in Nice a few days earlier, Maman remarked, ‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about when, at your age, you’re still not married…!’
The chicken tagine with olives had gone cold. Dounia was too offended to show up. My mother’s blood pressure had risen to 170 over 60 and she risked having one of her turns. Big Baba wandered into the garden and started nervously pulling out the long grass by the path.
It was all too much for my mother. Apart from a few tactless remarks, she didn’t understand what she had done to deserve this.
‘I’ve tried my best to make my children happy! Her problem is that she wishes she’d been born into a different family! She’s always been jealous of other people! Deep down, she’d like to be a Frenchie! That’s the truth of the matter!’
Mina, who had been close to Dounia in childhood, barely spoke to her these days. She was growing bitter about the sister she considered as the root of all our troubles.
Especially on one day in September 2001: Tuesday 11th September 2001, to be precise. I was 16 with a layer of fluff on my upper lip. Although I’d wanted to shave that morning, but I’d decided to wait a bit longer before becoming a man.
The whole planet was in a state of shock, and so were we. Far from New York, another dramatic scene was unfolding, a far-reaching and catastrophic attack on our family life.
Dounia had packed her bags. There was a car in front of the house, with its engine running and the boot open. I peeked through the living room curtains.
A hotshot young lawyer sat in the driver’s seat. Hanging off a wrist, as hairy as it was skinny, shone an enormous watch that could have told the time all the way to the other end of the street. On his nose, a pair of sunglasses designed for skiing. He looked ridiculous, not to mention disconcerting because he kept glancing in my direction, and I had no way of telling whether he could see that I could see him. When he waved at me, I closed the curtain hastily.
‘At least he understands me,’ Dounia’s shrill voice rang out in the hallway. ‘None of you understand me, and you never will.’
My mother’s hand gestures conveyed her sense of powerlessness.
Mina’s lips were quivering with emotion.
‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand anything. Aren’t you ashamed of putting our parents through this? You have to make everybody suffer with your lousy selfishness. Go on, do it then, clear off with your boyfriend, you lousy sell-out. And leave us in peace. We’re better off without you.’
‘My daughter! Why are you doing this? Why?’
My mother clutched her chest so tightly I thought her hand would dig a passage to her heart.
‘It’s not like anybody’s going to miss me if I leave. You’ve never loved me, anyway.’
‘It’s the devil whispering evil things to you! Don’t leave, my daughter!’
‘Let her walk out on us, Maman. Good riddance.’
‘If I’d let you have your way, you’d have slammed the brakes on my life. That’s the truth of the matter. Well, from now on I’m going to own my life and be free! I won’t let you choose a husband for me or lock me up inside this house.’
Crash!
Mina, who was close at hand, managed to cushion my mother’s fall.
‘Quick, Mourad! A glass of water! A glass of water!’
Don’t forget to picture all this happening in Mexican soap opera mode.
My father, who hadn’t reacted up until that point, finally spoke, ‘If you leave this house, you’re never coming back.’
‘I’ve already chosen between you and Daniel, and he wins hands down!’
Crash!
Big Baba landed on a chair in the living room.
There were tears in Dounia’s eyes as she walked away, but she never looked back; her emaciated body dragging a suitcase that appeared to weigh a tonne. I made to help her, but my father restrained me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I watched my sister disappear into the car together with that extra-heavy suitcase, Daniel, his hairy wrists and his enormous watch.
So that was how Dounia left us, having waited in vain for my parents to love her the right way. Nobody saw her again for nearly ten years.
Mina and Me
Our paternal grandfather lived to 103 on a diet of bread, honey, figs and olives. He had beautiful blue eyes that pierced our mountains to the West, and a beard as white as freshly harvested cotton. Sidi Ahmed Chennoun was the most handsome old man I have ever beheld. He made a point of crouching down when talking to us, and, at his request, he ate his meals at the children’s table.
He was full of stories. He’d lived long enough to experience different eras: witnessing wars and the changing of currencies; travelling by donkey as well as by train; communicating via telegram and then the mobile phone. When we were little, what astonished us most was that he also spoke French and even German.
During our holidays in Algeria, Mina and I loved watching him perform his early morning ablutions in the household courtyard, before making his dawn prayer.
Grandfather wasn’t afraid of dying. Today, I have a better understanding of why, but at the time I failed to grasp his faith and humility. He died a few years later, prostrated in prayer.
It was the first time I’d lost someone close to me. There had been that TV presenter who hosted a midday game show on France 1. I’d felt sad when he’d gone, but it was different.
With my grandfather, I pictured him closing his blue eyes for the last time, and I wondered, So does everything just stop?
Sidi Ahmed Chennoun was much loved. From what we were told, hundreds of people attended his burial.
Big Baba was furious he couldn’t be there. It happened during the first two weeks of July and all the flights on Air Algeria were full. An airline employee tapped away at her computer keyboard, her up-do stiff with hairspray.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Chennoun, but there’s no availability,’ she said, noisily chewing gum. ‘Not a single seat. All the flights are booked out. It’s a shame, because if your father had passed on even two days earlier, you could’ve had a seat on the 12.55…. You’re fresh out of luck!’
Big Baba didn’t find this easy to swallow.
Staring at the jobsworth in front of him, who was displaying zero sensitivity in response to his difficult bereavement, he asked, ‘Who raised you to behave like that? Donkeys? Dogs?’
Mina has always been very influenced by our grandfather. Out of all of us, she’s the one who evokes his memory most often.
She has a soft spot for old people. As a teenager, she used to spend her Wednesdays playing Scrabble at the local care home in Colline-Fleurie, behind the town hall. Back at ours afterwards, the smell of hairspray and second-hand clothes would cling to her.
She’s worked there ever since, and that same smell still lingers about her person. She plays the same games of Scrabble, even if her former opponents are all deceased.
At 20, Mina met Jalil, a healthcare assistant who worked at the same care home and who didn’t hang about when it came to asking for her hand in marriage.
On their engagement day, he brought his brothers, his parents,
his sister, his mother’s neighbour who had doubled as his wet nurse, his cousin by marriage and more guests than I can remember. We could have ushered the Rolling Stones into our living room, and no one would have paid them any attention. There were so many cars parked up in front of our gate, it looked like a Bastille Day military parade; with almost as many people, and just as much protocol.
My future brother-in-law, Jalil, and his family brought trays piled high with honey pastries, as well as presents for Mina, fabric for my mother, and plenty of money and noise. When they sang, some of them waved their handkerchiefs, others mini Algerian flags. When the older women ululated, they stuck their tongues right out to make their shameless high-pitched youyous. I remember my father staring at me and cracking a joke: ‘Watch out, cowboys! Here come the Indians!’ It was meant to ease the tension. He threw back his head and laughed, his fillings gleaming at the back of his mouth. He hadn’t laughed much since Dounia’s big departure.
As well as the usual biros clipped into his shirt pocket, Big Baba had insisted on my mother tying his best stripy tie, and he’d also decided to wear his pair of ex-shop-display spectacles, the ones with plastic lenses that were a gift from our pharmacist neighbour.
Now, I’d just like to point out that he didn’t have any problems with his eyesight. No, he wore those glasses perched on the end of his nose to give him a superior edge and to complete his important-and-respectable outfit. They were his accessory of choice whenever he had to deal with the authorities, attend a school meeting, or visit a travel agency; and then there were special occasions such as this.
As I stared at him in his tweed jacket that was too tight across the shoulders, it occurred to me that this was the person he would like to have been. Someone with a PhD in quantum physics, aloof and long-sighted, who felt comfortable everywhere and could hold his own with people from all walks of life.
Big Baba had done his best to impress Mina’s in-laws, but the natural joker in him hadn’t wasted any time in resurfacing. He monopolised the conversation all afternoon, with a catalogue of embarrassing stories that made my mother blush. No sooner had they left than she gave him a piece of her mind: a process which, as usual, took hours.
‘Always leaving me with h’chouma on my face. You’re like a language-mill, flinging out words.’
‘You were ashamed? You must be joking! They were begging for more, I’m telling you!’
‘They were too polite to say anything, but they’d had enough of your jokes, and as for those stories of yours that send everyone to sleep standing up!’
‘Nonsense, they loved them! It was lucky I was there to entertain them; if I’d left it to you, everyone would have died of boredom!’
‘You wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways! You didn’t draw breath all day! The moment you finished one story you started on another. You were talking so much it made them thirsty!’
‘Pfff… It’s taken me nearly 30 years of marriage to notice how jealous you are! Too bad!’
‘Did you really need to tell them about tinkering with the taxi meters back in Algeria? Or the mule you sold for 15,000 dinars to those poor Germans?’
‘They laughed so hard when I told them the one about the Germans! And it’s thanks to those scams I paid for our wedding!’
‘And you’re proud? It’s our marriage that’s the scam! And I’m the donkey for agreeing to marry you! Tfffou! Who knows if they’ll ever come back again, after those stupid stories! Mina will end up an old maid, because of you!’
My parents have always been crazy about each other. This kind of verbal sparring would spice up their daily lives, like a dash of harissa lifting a bland dish. It’s funny, when you think they were married without ever having clapped eyes on one another.
It would be fair to say that Mina chose a different path to Dounia’s. You’d think she had sworn to do the exact opposite. My theory is that she was afraid of letting our parents down, when it came to her turn. Family is sacred for her.
I can still picture the day when the imam conducted her religious marriage. She and Jalil have three children now. A girl and two boys: Khadija, Mohamed and Abou Bakr. My mother says they’ve got baraka, in other words they’re lucky: ‘God gave them a talent for it. Mina is fertile!’
When Mina told her she was pregnant for the third time, Maman replied, ‘Alhamdulillah! That’s good news! But tell me, my daughter, what do you eat? Compost?’
They set up home two streets away from our house. Jalil understands how close Mina needs to be to my mother. And vice versa.
Over time, Mina became the new big sister. She qualified as a healthcare assistant, specialising in geriatric care out of her love for the third age, and when she went back to work, she left the children with their grandmother, who was overjoyed with this arrangement.
A balance had been struck without ‘That One’; which is what we called Dounia, on the rare occasions when we still mentioned her.
As for me, after a year of toiling in the dark, like Chinese child labour in a Nike factory, I finally passed the CAPES. As in, the Certificate of Aptitude for Secondary School Teaching. I’m unpacking that acronym because I want every word to sink in.
I mean, holy shit. That’s some feat.
It was the seventh of July. My mother was frying aubergines. The smell of oil was seeping into everything, including the fibres of my T-shirt, which was already drenched in sweat. I was on the Publinet website, where they post the list of newly qualified secondary school teachers. The verdict was due at midday, and still nothing. Every minute, my trembling index finger clicked again to refresh the results page. It felt as if I sat there staring at the screen for an eternity, my eyes dilated like a junkie’s after their fix.
Adrenaline rushes are rare for someone like me: a guy nothing ever happens to.
And then, finally, I saw my name appear. I’d never felt so proud of that name. I stood up slowly, silently, and I was crying as I rubbed the back of my head. But I was quick to wipe away my tears. Big Baba says men don’t cry, and it’s always stuck with me.
It was reassuring to see my surname, followed by ‘Pass’. I was going to do something with my life.
At last, I could delete the cringe-making film that haunted me. A nightmare in which I had no social life, no job, and no friends.
In that film, I play an obese saddo with salt-and-pepper hair. I’m drowning in cooking fat and I still live in my parents’ house when I’m long past 50. My mum handwashes my underwear and cuts my toenails, because I’ve become too fat and too lazy to do it myself. I spend my days reading books I’ve already read, what with the effort of dragging my lardy body outside to borrow new tomes from the library.
I banished those gross images, and I prayed to God to save me from salt-and-pepper hair.
Solitude had led me to a love books, and now I was going to teach French literature.
My mother wanted to organise a big meal to celebrate my success.
Food, always.
She offered to make couscous. I remember wondering at the time whether she’d become superstitious about avoiding chicken tagine with olives.
‘You should invite your friends!’ my mother suggested, much to my surprise. Trouble was, I didn’t have any.
There was Raoul Wong, a former classmate and one of my few school friends to have found favour in Maman’s eyes, back in the day.
‘It’s good to have a Chinese friend! The Chinese work hard and don’t borrow other people’s pens. They’re calm and clean, and you never see them loitering outside. And another thing, they’re good with computers! In a few years, they’ll have the power, they’ll beat the Americans, and everyone will speak Chinese! You mark my words!’
Unluckily for me, Raoul Wong moved away last summer.
‘Well, Mourad? Have you decided how many people you’d like to invite?’
‘Not yet, Maman, I’ll think about it.’
‘Roughly how many… 10, 20, 30?’
‘I don’t know yet,
Maman.’
I was playing for time. What if I randomly invited 20 strangers I found online?
It was a source of sorrow for my mother that I was a loner. She had assumed, by turns, that I suffered from anxiety, or a personality disorder, or that I was gay.
But none of the above applied. I was a loner. End of. And I’d come to terms with it. Not that I think she understood the leading role she had played in the story of my social withdrawal. Nobody is solitary by nature.
Apart from Raoul Wong, my mother had never liked any of my friends. She criticised them all to the point of putting me off them too. As for girls, let’s not even go there. Nothing, and nobody, was good enough for her son.
One day, when I was in Year 11, Harry came to our home with his Super Nintendo to play Donkey Kong Country. Big Baba had given his permission.
Harry was the popular kid at our lycée. His clothes were sharp and he made everybody laugh. I couldn’t believe my luck when he agreed to come to my house with his console.
If I should ever stand beneath the golden canopy of the Republic, for the honour of being awarded a medal, I would probably feel less overwhelmed than I did that Wednesday afternoon when I saw Harry on our front doorstep.
‘You’ve got too many fake flowers in your house,’ Harry pointed out, as we walked through the living room. I was on such a high I didn’t even feel offended.
Then he became very serious and explained how the controls worked, before starting the game. I kept losing, falling into ravines and being bumped off by two-headed enemies.
Every so often, it got on Harry’s nerves that he’d picked such a rubbish gamer, but I was having the time of my life.
We’d only been playing for an hour when my mother came storming into my bedroom.