Boualem Sansal - Harraga

‘I can guess what comes next! You tossed her aside in a region so vast that people get lost inside their own homes.’

‘How dare you suggest such a thing! She left of her own accord… I…’

‘She’s not even seventeen years old, she knows nothing about life, she still believes in fairies, she’ll swallow any nonsense, but even she realised that you were the biggest cretin of all time. I’m just dumbfounded that it took her a couple of days to tell it to you straight.’

‘I… I…’

‘Go to hell!’

Going to court is out of the question, Chérifa is known to the police as a prostitute and she would probably be blamed for the battle between press and police at the university halls of residence. As a woman, she has no rights, as a prostitute she has a lot of explaining to do, as an unmarried teenage mother, she deserves the death penalty. Godforsaken ignorant fucking bled ! Besides, what judge would listen to me? I’m a woman, I’m a spinster, a troublemaker, I don’t wear the veil, I don’t own a burka, I walk with my head held high, I give as good as I get, and in the eyes of their infernal laws Chérifa is nothing to me. And I have no one to sign for me.

I crawled home. Emptiness, which after all is my universe, exploded inside my head; I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t breathe. I ceased to exist. Everything I loved, everything I had dreamed about with all my heart, everything I missed to the point that I turned myself into a nunlike automaton had miraculously come to life in the form of that uneducated, ungrateful, emotionally unstable girl. Life tore through me like a tornado through a cave. I gave her everything, she rejected everything and the breath of life that her presence inspired in me has leaked away like air from a burst tyre. I was angry with myself. I was angry with her, but I also saw a kind of fulfilment in that fundamental imbalance, I felt both uplifted and reduced to nothing, a nebulous middle ground between the happiness I had finally glimpsed and the perpetual, unending sadness of our life.

Where are you Chérifa? How far can your life take you when there is nothing to hold you back? Wherever you are, if you can read my thoughts, you should know that Rampe Valée, the haunted house and the heart of Lamia will always be open to you.

It’s time to go home and get ready to wait; eternity is a long time.

A bird is a thing of beauty

But, alas, a bird has wings

Which, just as they serve to alight

So too they serve to take flight.

That is the tragedy of birds.

I was inspired when I wrote those words.

To Live or to Die

All that is begun must end

This we have known since the dawn of time.

Already to speak is to be silent

And to be born is already to die.

What matters that God wills

And the Devil laughs?

Our reason for being

Our incessant lunacy

Is doggedly to believe

In the impossible.

That which is finished is invited

To begin again

And thus

Living is possible.

In my stupor I see everything in shades of grey, a shabby, squalid grey. The world seems a thousand leagues away, or somewhere off to one side, I’m not sure. I pass my days without seeing it. I remember that the world existed once, that as the result of some accident, some curse, some wasting disease, I have been exiled from it. I allow myself to drift, it is futile to cling to anything in a world that is crumbling. I lash out between the falls, I rant and rave between convulsions, I pull myself together but it doesn’t last and the pain after the calm is more intense.

I watch television the way you might leaf through a book in the dark, I listen to the radio, but all it does is buzz in my ear and when I retreat into silence a terrible roaring fills my head and turmoil crushes my heart. At the hospital, I manhandle the kids as though they were my own brats and their mothers tear them from my arms. They are suspicious of me, there are rumours of children being stolen, clapped in irons and sold at auction, rented out to beggar women, shipped off to war zones. Some are found alive, others dead, but most of them are never seen again. And once more I am faced with the Dantesque vision of a starless sky, a planet with no children, and — on the small scale that is my world in the arse-end of Rampe Valée — a house with no Lolita.

How did I ever manage to live without my Louiza, my sister, when the absence of Chérifa is killing me? In me, the same causes do not produce the same effects, each time the result is worse. Either I’m starting to show my age or I’m sick and tired of watching my life draining away in torrents, Papa, Maman, Yacine, Sofiane, Chérifa and everything else that’s ebbed and gone: people, little pleasures, daydreams in the moonlight, even the kittens that purred on the sofa have grown into fat alley cats that keep us awake at night. Dear God, how painful this life is!

I hate what I’ve become, I’m emotional, hysterical, quick to confuse things, too unbalanced to keep on an even keel, I’ve tipped into catatonia. I tell myself that reason is the antidote to these bouts of madness but even as I think this, it occurs to me that healing simply clears the ground for new contagion. God forbid I should have come to the point of finding my pleasure in pain, my freedom in captivity, my clarity in chaos, my tranquillity in turmoil. It’s a terrifying thought.

I began to search again, I’m not one to sit around doing nothing. Scheherazade visited less and less so I went and surprised her at the university at Ben — Aknoun. After all she might have heard something. Monsieur 235 went with me at a moment’s notice, his rustbucket of a bus spitting fumes and flames. I thought it might be a good idea for him to visit the halls of residence so he could keep his mother supplied with lady’s companions and — who knows? — might even find a lady for himself — or two, or three, or why not four, after all he is a Muslim, a religion that favours one-sided polygamy. Scheherazade’s rabbit hutch was minuscule, but absolutely charming; it would make a lovely cupboard in someone’s mansion. She was wearing slippers and a night cap, her eyes were red and her eyelids twitched. I was worried I had tired her out with all my questions, but no, she had been cramming, burning the candle at both ends, exams were looming and rumours were rife that quotas had been imposed by people in high places. She was a nervous wreck. I tried to reassure her: there have been all sorts of rumours since the programme of reform proposed by the marabouts that would spell triumph for cretinism, militant fundamentalism and galloping racism. I know all about these reforms, I was a nervous wreck myself. The ministry wants no more nurses, no more doctors, and certainly no more lab assistants and absolutely no… what else… oh, that’s right, no more people who can read and write! Apparently there are so many we don’t know what to do with them, but then suddenly we find out that actually we don’t have nearly enough and have to start churning them out again. Still the ministry ploughs ahead, slashing funding, turning a blind eye to negative results, opening new hospitals wherever it can find four walls, operating on the basis that hiring thirteen numskulls to the dozen is the perfect solution to rampant unemployment. Development has become a co-ordinated series of imbalances, or at least that’s what I heard on some deathly dull TV talk show. This makes sense if you already know how to walk, otherwise it might be best to stay sitting down — something armchair pundits are experts at. The real problem is that the restricted intake into the medical profession is based on the size of the population and not, as it should be, on the number of people who are actually ill; while the former is dwindling dangerously, the latter is growing exponentially. In such circumstances, it seems obvious that the way to calculate is not simply by adding zeroes, but the ministry refuses to acknowledge this, preferring to cling to the old methods that worked well back when the dead did not talk.