Boualem Sansal: Harraga

To distract myself from my woes and Scheherazade from her fears, we had some mint tea and sang old songs which, given our mood, were deeply depressing. The girls in Block 12, who had either been dozing and fretting or swotting and daydreaming, joined in and our sotto voce blues became a raucous racket that echoed down the corridors, leaving nothing to the imagination of Satan himself. When women get together, they quickly become shameless. The girls dug out scarves and tambourines and started to play and suddenly it was pandemonium, there was winking and belly rolls and more besides. It’s a glorious sight watching people revert to the wild state, and rediscover their vices. It was so loud we wouldn’t have heard God Himself raging against the infidels. Finding himself the centre of attention, 235 took the opportunity to hard-sell the virtues of his saintly mother. He was exultant, everything suddenly seemed possible. Every single girl there promised to come and sit with his Maman once their exams were over. And when a girl is perfect for a mother, how much more perfect is she for the son? All 235 had to do now was trust to the skills of these girls to capture him dead or alive.

The fires of love having been kindled, I could slip away and carry on my lonely quest. From time to time, it’s good to stave off the tears, but mostly, the best thing to do is cry your eyes out. Just then, I felt torn.

I did the rounds of the maternity wards, there must be about twenty in Algiers and the suburbs, I sowed some seeds by which I mean I appealed to colleagues, to those who still remember their oaths, to friends I knew from university, to friends of friends, and to their pals too.

‘You couldn’t miss her,’ I told my conscripts, emphasising the importance of doing a good job when you’re lucky enough to have one, ‘the second she walks into a room all eyes turn. She’s eight months gone, a Lolita dragging around a beach ball, if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll spot her.’

As a quid pro quo , I offered to get each of them some piece of medical equipment in return, the poor things have only their fingernails to work with and only their eyes to weep. They drew up a wish list that would have brought tears to the eye of a medical supplier. One of them asked for an electric generator. There’s no shortage of equipment at the Hôpital Parnet, the hospital manager is well connected, being the minister’s cousin and the Pasha’s nephew, but even so, this was some list! I needed to work out how to smuggle the things out of the hospital without being spotted. The security guards sleep all day, but if I trusted to that I was bound to get caught.

I went back to waiting. I was tense, I spent my time agonising, surmising, supposing, going round in circles, never straying far from the phone. I thought about buying a mobile phone but they cost an arm and a leg, I don’t have the money and I don’t have the energy to traipse round the shops, it’s all too exhausting and I’m sick to the back teeth of sales patter. I trusted in my own alert system, Chérifa’s not the kind to sleep in the streets, she’d show up at some hospital demanding bed, board and blanket — something the King of Spain would be hard pressed to find if he took it into his head to seek treatment here. Life has given Chérifa a rough ride, yet somehow she’s managed to develop the personality of a spoiled brat; she could bring the sternest hospital porter to his knees.

Minute by minute, I counted off the remaining weeks, the last days, the final hours before the end. By my calculations, on May 22, under the sign of Gemini, the nine months of Chérifa’s pregnancy elapsed and she was delivered. Wait… wait a minute, say that again, old woman! De… delivered! So… so soon, so early? Wh… where…? When…? How…? Is it a girl… a boy? Sh… she’s a mother… That makes me… makes me… um… I was babbling. Shock, delight, sorrow, worry, anger, disappointment, I felt all these things seething inside me.

I know a thing or two about giving birth. Time was the maternity ward at Parnet exercised an irresistible fascination for me. I was obsessive. I would come and go, pretend to be dawdling like everyone else. The truth was I never tired of the joy of seeing those little amphibious monsters, flushed with fury, struggling like the devil to emerge from their mothers and greedily latching on to the breast. Hardly born and already starving. I was awed by the beauty of these wrinkled, blind, bawling, blood-streaked creatures that smelled of sour milk and yellow diarrhoea. And I also watched, distraught, as angels arrived dead, their bodies limp, their skin blue, watched their mothers gazing fondly at them clinging to the belief that Allah knows what He is doing. I call that murder, but deaths in hospitals are not counted that way and we have been taught to accept whatever Allah wills. I have watched wonderful midwives clucking contentedly as they worked and poisonous witches who acted as though they were in the pay of rich landowners anxious to enhance their health, their youth, their social standing; I have seen doctors who were the epitome of kindness and many more who are repulsive shits. And the problems of underdevelopment, the idiocies of religion, the dodgy deals of the cliques lining each other’s pockets as they preside over the neglect.

One day, I’d had enough, I don’t remember whether I was chased out of the maternity unit or whether I simply got tired of remonstrating with self-important idiots.

The idea that Chérifa is somewhere in that grotesque system is unbearable.

I phoned again and again and again. My heart was filled with such rage… and yet with such hope.

‘Sorry, she’s not here.’

‘Nothing to report.’

‘Are you sure about your dates? She’s definitely nine months?’

‘Try calling Beni-Messous Hospital, it’s like a battery farm, she’s bound to be there.’

‘She’s not here with us, I just hope she’s not in the maternity unit at Belfort — remember what happened there six months ago?’

‘There was a little Lolita here, but she was completely crazy, she acted like my ex-husband’s grandmother.’

‘Call the police, we could do with them investigating this place!’

‘Get in touch with the association for missing babies, you’ve heard the rumours…’

‘Sorry, I completely forgot that you asked me, I’ve got my own problems, my husband is… hello? Hellooo?’

I hung up on her, I wasn’t going to get stuck listening to her problems, I had more than enough of my own!

‘Maybe she gave birth in a taxi… you know yourself that traffic jams are the biggest maternity unit in the country.’

‘Why don’t you put an ad in the paper?’

‘I’ve been off work the past few days. Give me a call tomorrow.’

‘…’

You wouldn’t believe the things I had to listen to. Useless, the lot of them, looking for any excuse to give up. Some of them I’d happily kill with my bare hands. I’ll have to check for myself. Where the hell is Mourad? He’s never around when you need him! For pity’s sake, a man can have a hangover and still show up for work. I called 235 and he zoomed here in his bulletproof bus. He’ll get himself fired if he keeps doing me favours. We did the rounds of the hospitals, it was tedious, tortuous and disappointing.

You can refuse to accept them, throw a tantrum, but facts are facts: Chérifa really had disappeared.

I suppose that I might say: everything has come to pass. It was at this point that I truly gave up hope.

One after another the days slipped past, stealthily, invisibly. Hardly had Monday passed than Friday drew to a close in shame and disgust. The noise of the city came to me as though from some distant planet, I don’t know whether it was this that I heard or the wind whipping up. My mind was on other things, I was connected to the ineffable pulse of time itself, that steady drip that echoes from one end of the universe to the other and deep within our every thought. Something had happened, far from me, beyond my control, beyond my means. Fate — I have no truck with it, but mektoub was clearly to blame — had proved more powerful, more cunning, more bitter and more swift than my love. I had been naive, I had been stupid, I had believed that love conquered all, that you only had to open your heart, your arms, your home to clinch the deal. I did everything I could — God is my witness — everything but what mattered: selflessness, doing something without expecting something in return. It’s too late, I know it all too well, I have ceased to weep, to complain, to fear, I have ceased to suffer.