Boualem Sansal - Harraga

Chérifa and I huddled in a corner and wept buckets.

And then she told me everything. She was four years old when her mother died. She has no memory of her mother and doesn’t know what she died of. I know how she feels, we get a lot of women at the Hôpital Parnet so damaged that it’s pointless to try and work out what they are suffering from, we make a wild guess and we get it wrong. We write Generalised Infirmity and close the file. Chérifa’s eight brothers, all older than her, worked in nearby farms and mills which meant she never saw more than three or four of them at a time. The road was their home. Then, one morning, the father married a she-devil sent back from hell who bore him a litter of sons and daughters. ‘How many of each?’ ‘A bunch, I don’t know, their mother spent all day coddling them and Papa left her to it.’ He was obviously scared of her. When the Islamists showed up and started cutting the throats of local girls, the she-devil fawned on them, made couscous for them, tattled to them about the sins of others hoping to deflect their wrath from her own house. Chérifa posed a problem — being wayward, independent, a moaner, a truant and devilishly pretty, she was an irresistible delicacy for the bearded fundamentalists. One morning, she packed a bag and got the hell out. It is a story that is played out a hundred times, a thousand times all over the country and before long over the world. The green plague of Islamofascism knows no borders. One day, girls will be burned in towns across California, I can just see it, and it won’t be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘… my stepmother hated me, I swear, it’s like I was trying to replace her! I loathe her, she’s ugly, she’s evil, she’s a thief. She called me the devil’s daughter, she’d claim she’d seen me when I hadn’t even done anything.’

‘Seen you where… doing what?’

‘With boys!’

‘I suspected as much.’

‘Papa is a coward, whenever he got me on my own, he’d plead with me, beg me to hide myself behind the hijab to avoid the wrath of his bloodsucking wife and the cut-throat religious bastards. So I packed a bag and left. It serves them right!’

‘Now listen to me, around here I don’t want you saying you’re not religious. I swear, you’re soft in the head. This is Islam we’re talking about, they’ll burn you alive and me with you!’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Oh, but you do care! You’ve got a baby on the way, and I don’t fancy being burned at the stake.’

‘Then I’ll go away and you won’t have to worry.’

‘Go where? These people are out there, it’s like The X Files . And don’t say you’ll go to Europe, because let me tell you they’ve got their feet under the table there too, and things are getting to be pretty tough for girls!’

‘Then I’ll go somewhere else.’

‘You little fool. It’s the same everywhere.’

‘I’ll… um…’

‘You see? You can learn when you make an effort.’

‘Um…’

‘But you’re right — why should we give a damn about religion? Why should we go around weeping and wailing? If Allah doesn’t love us, too bad! We’ll go with Satan. Come on, let’s go into town, we’ll show them, we’ll have a ball, we’ll eat ice cream, we’ll have a laugh, we’ll walk in the sunshine, we’ll squander my money on fripperies and while we’re at it, we’ll buy some shameless clothes! And if they burn us, so what? We’ll shoot straight to hell like dazzling fireworks!’

Dear God, the tailspin! When your heart is in it, it’s hard not to love Algiers. It was a revelation, the city opened wide its slick arms to welcome us. The shops, the bazaars, the salons de thé , we were all smiles as we strolled along the boulevards and stopped off in the parks. Chérifa swayed her belly and her hips as to the manner born while I — not having the figure of a skinny nymphet — was humble and unassuming. Hard on our heels, moving to the same rhythm, the freaks and fanatics followed behind, waiting for any excuse to pounce. Just before the trouble broke out, I turned into a scandalous woman and suddenly they scuttled into the alleyways like cockroaches. More cowards working towards their shame. To our delight, we did not see it coming. We did not even realise night had drawn in until we saw people heading home, heads bowed, walking quickly. Decent folk ran for cover. It was a stampede. Let them run, the cowards! The curfew in Algiers was lifted donkey’s years ago, someday the siege will be over, the torture centres will disappear; these days the TV broadcasts nothing but popular music and idle chatter, the newspapers are full of tittle-tattle, the President spends his time taking pleasure cruises, life is perfect, but the old reflexes remain, the people of Algiers still live in fear. Lies terrify them as much as truth. Cars raced along suddenly deserted streets. Silence and the stench of death descended upon Algiers, rolling out towards the city ramparts.

We got back to the neighbourhood at about nine o’clock. There was no reason in the world that could justify two women being out on the street at such an hour. Rampe Valée is the middle of nowhere, a steep hill that scrabbles past the Kasbah to vanish into the suburbs, it is the far side of the moon. There were no taxis, no buses, and not a single streetlamp to light our way. It’s stupid, this habit we have of seeking out the light, it would simply make us visible to men waiting in the shadows. It reminds me of the parable of the streetlamp… the man who loses his wallet in the middle of a dark street but searches for it in the nearest pool of light. This is the absurdity of treating everything as black and white, you stop just where the sequel starts. Where did we come by the idea that light is always a blessing? Chérifa and I took our courage in both hands and plunged into the darkness of the labyrinth. I walked ahead, guided by memory. Everything is mapped out in my head, distances, bends, potholes, hillocks, walls. We were scared witless. There was not a cat, not a dog, not a rat to be seen, nothing was stirring, the neighbourhood looked as though it had been playing dead for centuries. Aside from our breathless panting, the click-clack of our heels and, always, ceaseless and mysterious, the hushed, distant pulse of the heavens, there was nothing: silence, stillness, emptiness.

Dear God, is every night like this in our blessed city?

Chérifa was no longer strutting brazenly, she was clinging to my arm with both hands, trembling from head to foot. Our little escapade had served its purpose. Rather than using words to persuade, it’s better to demonstrate and devastate. Robinson Crusoe would have been hard pressed to come up with a better solution.

As I was closing the door, I saw among the wavering shadows of the poplar trees the figure of a man disappearing into the darkness. Could it be the same man I thought I saw when Chérifa first vanished? What can it mean other than that we are being watched? By whom? And why?

Nonchalance has its flipside, things are beginning to look grim.

As I always say: bring on the fear.

The days passed, we went out only to do the shopping. One morning, I took Chérifa to the Hôpital Parnet for a routine check-up and, ten days later, we dashed to the post office to queue for something or other, to fill out answers to questions I didn’t understand. I don’t remember which particular law required that I present myself at Counter No. 6 to deal with some legal dispute. What legal dispute? Where? When? As it turned out, the writ was intended for a third party, some oddball who had dared to complain to the management about the service at the aforementioned Counter No. 6 and had been summoned to suffer the consequences. By some unfortunate twist of fate, the summons had ended up in my letterbox. Legal documents will be the death of me, try as I might, I can never cure myself. They seem to be drawn up in Cyrillic from the time of the pharaohs or the Arabic of the international Islamist. I don’t even take the time to check, I head for the hills. It’s hard to believe, but legal documents throw me into such a panic I don’t even recognise my own name. This is not the first time that Moussa, postman and general factotum of Rampe Valée, has made a mistake. There are days when he delivers his letters more or less at random. Now, I know precisely what his problem is, but he could make a little effort! Moussa was a postman of the old school, he used the Latin alphabet, he was proud of his peaked cap and his cape, he loved his thick clodhopping boots. As children, Louiza and I were in awe of him because he was always wrapped up warm and invariably punctual regardless of the state of the weather. I seem to remember that one bitterly cold day, we dreamed that someday we might marry him. He did well for himself, he got Christmas bonuses, his little calendars sold like hot cakes, and when he showed up we’d call ‘Hi, Moussa!’ and ‘ Bravo, la poste! ’ as he left. Then, when the seismic shift came in 1976, when every street sign, every road sign was replaced in the space of a single night, he did his best to Arabise in the few short hours allotted, but the edict caught him off guard, as it did all of us. Here I’m prepared to reveal a secret jealously guarded by the administration: he lied to his boss, who was also of the old school; between the two of them they could barely decipher half the new Arabic script; Moussa admitted as much one day when I caught him red-handed pleading with some scruffy schoolboy to translate an address for him. In the course of a single night, the streets had changed their names, their language, their alphabet. It cannot be easy, and sometimes he is overcome by blind panic, he feels as though he is in some foreign land, his guardian angel replaced by a fearsome djinn , and, terrified of being hunted down for treason, he pushes envelopes into the nearest letterboxes, all the while doing his best to look like he knows what he’s doing. He explained his dilemma to me one day when, finding him in a terrible state, I gave him a full jug of coffee to buck him up. I hope that the old codger will escape the hornets’ nest alive, I feel an intimate connection with the insane.