Boualem Sansal - Harraga

‘We’re very fond of her… um… we…’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, um…’

‘I get it.’

We’re all in the same boat; like me, the girls at the university are filling an emptiness in their lives. Apart from their textbooks and their notebooks, they have nothing that makes them feel human. Their lives at the university felt hollow, formless, a prelude to their lives as women, a shadowgraph, a mere outline; they were hardworking, diligent, dutiful, submissive, slaves to timetables and rituals, and Chérifa, naive and happy-go-lucky, came along and challenged everything. In discovering our innermost dreams, we do not emerge unscathed. And, being women, we have too many dreams.

Scheherazade abruptly got to her feet. The night porter was about to begin his shift and would discover she was absent at roll-call. After six pm, the price of his silence is exorbitant.

She promised to come back and see me.

Algiers airport is unlike any in the world. All the dangerous contraptions the commercial aviation industry has devised ever since Icarus first flew too close to the sun are to be found there. With all its junk and all its gaping wounds I can’t understand how it’s still standing. The building is all splints and plasters. It’s a miracle the planes still remember how to fly. I had a knot in my stomach as I stepped inside this beleaguered world that looks like a national disaster and where a sizeable subset of humanity rushes, shrieks, weeps, jostles and gesticulates. After several collisions and copious sweating, I found myself standing in front of a breeze-block barrier next to the public lavatories, a mouldering area where the ambient temperature was several hundred degrees. Above the low wall a cardboard sign suspended from the ceiling was emblazoned in red with the words Bienvenu, Information in twelve different languages (or simply repeated twelve times). I stepped forward. Behind the counter, a phalanx of bungling idiots were playing a game a little like ‘Battleships’. The aim is to destroy the maximum number of planes with the minimum number of bombs in the shortest possible time. Brazenly, I addressed them, but they spoke a language I could not quite place, something gruff, halting, punctuated by sprays of black spittle and accompanied by threatening gestures. Nearby, sitting cross-legged on blocks of wood, girls wearing pagnes and bonnets were shelling peas, grinding millet or knitting mittens. They were not happy, something is bothering them so they adopt the pose of scorned lovers. I often prefer to view things and people through a distorting prism, I find it makes them easier to understand, they prove to be different to how they appear. The leader of this tribe, easily identifiable by her headdress, her sceptre and a fine collection of pendants dangling from her neck, her ears, even her navel, looked daggers at me, but when I explained that I had not come to disturb their glorious rituals but to see my cousin Rachid, a pilot, about a family matter of the utmost importance, she flashed me a lewd smile. I was treated to a volley of crude sniggers and a barrage of innuendo. Rachid clearly has something of a reputation among his fellow pilots who envy him and covet his many ‘cousins’. I squeezed my eyes closed and imagined them all being strangled by King Kong and, emerging from this therapy, I found myself face to face with a man in his priestly garb, a sort of evangelical minister with a firm but gentle voice. He had appeared from a hut behind the stockade. Beneath his penetrating gaze, I felt childish and naive.

‘What do you want, woman?’

I was safe, this fellow spoke my dialect of Latin. I explained myself again, employing broken Arabic the better to flatter his eloquence and get the information I needed at a bargain price. The minister gazed at me for a long time, peered searchingly into my eyes until he could see the colour of my knickers, then he nodded, shrugged, bustled about behind his pulpit, scribed a few hieroglyphics with the aid of a golden flint, mumbled some incantations into a handset and in the time it takes to roast a lizard over a slow flame, a knight from an operetta appeared in full regalia whom I immediately recognised: fortysomething, pot-bellied, a cheery fellow, he went by the name of Rachid. When he saw me, impeccably dressed in my immaculate chasuble, he unsheathed the smile reserved for fine ladies, a solemn, sophisticated, nonchalant rictus that twitched at the corners of his mouth. Scheherazade was right, the handsome hunk was a miserable loser.

I needed to quickly befriend him if I was to achieve my goal: to find Chérifa safe and sound.

True to the dictates of his shallow, callous nature, he immediately attempted to seduce me. Usually, I am brutal with self-styled Lotharios who try to chat me up, but in this case I decided to be tactful:

‘I’m in a relationship with a sort of Bluebeard who’s planning to cut my throat, but if you want to try your luck in twenty or thirty years’ time, and assuming I’m still up to it, I’ll willingly give myself to you for free.’

The man’s a chancer. He said, ‘You’re on.’

Via a rickety metal fire escape, we headed down to the terrace café like a couple of travellers each with his own map. Panoramic views of the hinterland, lifeless suburbs sporting a shock of state-of-the-art satellite dishes, abandoned building sites with girders soaring into empty space and cranes slowly rusting, the motorway sweeping impetuously away with its miscellaneous cars and vehicles and, in the distant mountains, a raging forest fire. This is the ravaged, windswept landscape of Dinotopia, where bellowing pterodactyls take wing and tyrannosaurs breathe fire. The magic of the IMF has done its work here and we have been sent back to the Middle Ages filled with fearsome djinns and comical mendicants. Below us sprawled the airport, the hangars, the ramshackle planes lined up with their noses to the wind, the runway with its puddles, its potholes, its airstairs, its windsocks; the ballet of baggage handlers. I can’t begin to describe the strange things that were happening on the ground, light-fingers were fluttering and filching and in broad daylight. Oh, yes, and there were policemen, dozens of them everywhere.

‘I’m listening,’ I said, before he forgot himself.

Though I know it all too well, as I listened to him regale me with tales of his conquests, I was reminded how intelligent imbecility needs to sound if it is to prosper. I’ve never heard the like. He’d met Chérifa in the café next to Air Algérie downtown. His heart had skipped a beat, the sight of a Lolita in distress moved our gallant hero. He had qualms, but he did what he felt was his duty. He is prepared to try anything once, and he likes to show off his trophies. He felt particularly proud of this catch: a pregnant, abandoned girl — what better? Good lord, he paraded her around the Great South, flying her in his rusty crate to Tamanrasset, Djanet, Timimoun, Illizi, tourist destinations for those of us from the Great North, sand upon sand in millions of tonnes, heat capable of melting stones, clumps of palm trees here and there to indicate areas of human habitation surrounded by the vast immensity and by silver-tongued men with sombreros and Toyotas who pretend that they have a timetable to respect. That little wretch Chérifa manages to commandeer bus drivers, pilots and army officers, while I’m having trouble making ends meet! Chérifa, of course, was delighted; she laughed at everything, marvelled at everything, was thrilled to see the white-hot sky floating above the boundless, white-hot sands and, between the two, the Blue Men, those magnificent nomads, trailed by gentle, gallant dromedaries across the rolling dunes. Dear God, I picture her there and I feel distraught, how could she have thought life in the desert would be fun? Then, of course, she started having pains, vomiting, thrashing about.