Kamel Daoud - The Meursault Investigation

So how come I’ve wound up in a city once again, Oran this time? Good question. Maybe it’s self-punishment. Look around a little, here in Oran or elsewhere. It’s as though people have a grudge against the city and they’ve come here to trash it and plunder it, like a kind of foreign country. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, they fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days, but they can’t leave it, because it’s the only possible escape to the sea and the farthest you can get from the desert. Make a note of that, it’s quite good, I think, ha, ha! An old song, a local favorite, has a line that goes, “Beer is Arab and whiskey’s Western.” Which is wrong, of course. I often amend it when I’m alone: The song is Oranian, the beer’s Arab, the whiskey’s European, the bartenders are Kabyles, the streets are French, the old porticos are Spanish … and I could go on. I’ve lived here for several decades now, and I like it fine. The sea’s down there, far away, crushed underfoot by the harbor. It won’t take anyone away from me and can never reach me.

I’m doing fine, see? It’s been years since I’ve seriously spoken my brother’s name, except in my head and in this bar. My countrymen have a habit of calling anybody they don’t know “Mohammed,” but the name I give everyone is “Musa.” That’s also our barman’s name, you can call him that, it’ll make him smile. It’s as important to give a dead man a name as it is to name a newborn infant. Yes, it’s very important. My brother’s name was Musa. On the last day of his life, I was seven years old, and so I don’t know any more about him than what I’ve told you. I can’t quite recall the name of our street in Algiers. All I remember is that Bab-el-Oued was the name of the neighborhood, and the market, and the cemetery. The rest has disappeared from my memory. Algiers still scares me, though. It has nothing to say to me and remembers neither me nor my family. And picture this: One summer, it was 1963, I think, right after Independence, I went back to Algiers, determined to conduct my own investigation. But I barely got out of the train station before I lost my resolve and turned back. It was hot, I felt ridiculous in the suit I was wearing, and everything was going so fast it made me dizzy, too fast for a villager used to the slow cycles of harvests and trees. I immediately turned back. My reason? It’s obvious, my young friend. I told myself that if I found our old house again, death would end up finding us, Mama and me. And so would the sea, and injustice. That’s pompous, and it sounds like a line that’s been rehearsed for a long time, but it’s also the truth.

Let’s see, let me try to remember exactly … How did we learn of Musa’s death? I remember a kind of invisible cloud hovering over our street and angry grown-ups talking loud and gesticulating. At first, Mama told me that a gaouri had killed one of the neighbor’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor. Then, during the night, anxiety got inside our house, and I think Mama gradually began to realize the truth. So did I, probably. And then, all of a sudden, I heard this long, low moan, swelling until it became immense, a huge mass of sound that destroyed our furniture and blew our walls apart and then blew up the whole neighborhood and left me all alone.

I remember starting to cry for no reason, just because everyone was looking at me. Mama had disappeared, and I got shoved outside, rejected by something more important than me, absorbed into some kind of collective disaster. Strange, don’t you think? I told myself, confusedly, that this might be about my father, that he was definitely dead this time, which made me sob twice as hard. It was a long night; nobody slept. A constant stream of people came in to offer their condolences. The grown-ups spoke to me solemnly. When I couldn’t understand what they were telling me, I contented myself with looking at their hard eyes, their shaking hands, and their shabby shoes. When the dawn came, I felt very hungry, and I wound up falling asleep I don’t know where. No matter how much I dig around in my memory, I have no recollection at all of that day and the next, except I recall the smell of couscous. The days blurred into a sort of immensely long single day, tall and broad like a deep valley, where I meandered with other solemn kids who were showing me the respect due to my new status as “the hero’s brother.” That’s all I remember. The last day of a man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

I’m going home. How about you?

Yes, the barman’s name is Musa — in my head, at any rate. And the other one, the one over there, in the back? I’ve christened him Musa too. But he’s got a whole different story, that one. He’s older and surely half widowed, or half married. Notice his skin, it’s like parchment. He’s a former inspector of education in the teaching of the French language. I know him. I don’t like to look him in the eye because he’s liable to seize the opportunity to get inside my head, make himself comfortable, and tell me the story of his life, jabbering away in my place. I keep my distance from sad people. The two other guys behind me? Same profile. The bars still open in this country are aquariums containing mostly bottom-feeders, weighed down and scraping along. You come here when you want to escape your age, your god, or your wife, I believe, but in any case haphazardly. Well, all right, I suppose you know a bit about this kind of place. Except that recently they’ve been closing all the bars in the country, and all the customers are like trapped rats, jumping from one sinking boat to another. And when we get down to the last bar, there will be a lot of us, old boy, we’ll have to use our elbows. That moment will be the real Last Judgment. I invite you to attend, it’s coming soon. You know what the regulars call this place? The Titanic. But if you look at the sign, you see the name of a mountain: Djebel Zendel. Go figure.

No, I don’t want to talk about my brother today. We’ll just look at all the other Musas in this dive, one by one, and imagine — as I often do — how they would have survived a shot fired in bright sunlight or how they managed never to cross paths with that writer of yours or, in a word, how they’ve managed not to be dead yet. There are thousands of them, believe me. They’ve been dragging their feet since Independence. Strolling along beaches, burying dead mothers, looking out from their balconies for hours. Damn! Sometimes this bar reminds me of the old folks’ home where your Meursault put his mother: the same silence, the same discreet aging, the same end-of-life rituals. I started drinking a little early, but I’ve got a good excuse: my acid reflux attacks, which tend to come at night … Do you have a brother? No? Good.

Yes, I love this city, even if I adore bad-mouthing it at least as much as I do bad-mouthing women. People come here looking for money, or the sea, or a heart. No one was ever born here; everybody comes from the other side of the only mountain in sight. Incidentally, I wonder who sent you here and how you found me. It’s hardly credible, you know, for years nobody believed us, Mama and me. The two of us, we ended up burying Musa, really. Yes, yes, I’ll explain it to you.

Ah, there he is again … No, don’t turn around. I call him “the bottle ghost.” He comes here almost every day. As often as I do. We acknowledge each other without ever saying a word. I’ll tell you more about him later.