Yasmina Khadra - What the day owes the nigth

Bliss the broker came to see my uncle at the pharmacy. I realised who it was as soon as I heard him clear his throat. I was in the back office doing my homework when he arrived. I peered through a gap in the curtain that separated the office from the shop. Bliss was soaked to the skin, wearing a second-hand burnous that was much too big for him, a mud-spattered baggy sarouel and rubber sandals that tracked dirt all over the floor.

My uncle looked up from his ledger, clearly none too pleased to see the broker. Bliss rarely ventured into the European part of town. From the look on the man’s face, my uncle could tell that whatever had brought him here was not good news.

‘Yes . . . ?’

Bliss pushed his fez back off his face and scratched his head furiously, obviously embarrassed.

‘It’s about your brother, Doctor,’ he said.

My uncle slammed the cash register shut. Realising I had been watching, he came out from behind the counter, took Bliss by the elbow and led him to a corner of the shop. I climbed down off my stool and crept to the curtain to listen.

‘What about my brother?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What? What do you mean, he’s disappeared?’

‘He hasn’t been home . . .’

‘Since when?’

‘It’s been three weeks now.’

‘Three weeks? And you’re only coming to tell me this now?’

‘It’s his wife’s fault. You know what women are like when their husbands run off. They’d let their house catch fire rather than ask for help. I only found out this morning when Batoul the clairvoyant said that your brother’s wife came to her last night and asked her to read her palm and tell her where her husband was. That was the first Batoul knew that the woman hadn’t seen her husband for three weeks.’

‘My God!’

I dashed back to my desk.

My uncle pulled back the curtain and found me poring over my poetry book.

‘Go get Germaine and tell her to look after the shop. I have some urgent business I need to deal with.’

I picked up my book and left the shop. As I passed, I tried to see what Bliss was thinking, but he turned away. I tore through the streets like a child possessed.

Germaine couldn’t sit still. As soon as she’d served each customer, she would come into the back office to check on me, worried by how calm I seemed. From time to time, unable to stop herself, she would tiptoe up behind me and lean over my shoulder as I learned my recitation pieces by heart. She stroked my hair, then let her hand slide down to my forehead to take my temperature.

‘Are you sure you feel all right?’

I said nothing.

That last look on my father’s face as he stood, reeling from drink and shame, gnawed at my insides again like a tapeworm.

Night had fallen hours ago and still my uncle was not back. Outside, in the driving rain, a horse had collapsed in the street, upending the cart it had been pulling and spilling a load of coal across the road. The driver, cursing his horse and the weather, tried in vain to get the animal to its feet.

Germaine and I watched from the window as the horse lay in the street, its neck twisted, its mane rising and falling on the rising river of rainwater.

The carter went to fetch help, and found a group of men prepared to brave the storm. One of them crouched next to the horse.

‘The old nag is dead,’ he said in Arabic.

‘He can’t be, he just slipped.’

‘I’m telling you, he’s stone dead.’

The carter refused to believe the man and crouched down next to the animal, though he did not dare touch it.

‘I can’t believe it, he was fine earlier.’

‘Animals can’t tell you when they’re sick,’ said the first man. ‘You’ve probably been driving the horse too hard.’

Germaine took the crank handle to lower the security grille, handed me her umbrella, turned out the lights then urged me outside. She put the padlock on the shutter, took the umbrella from me and hugged me close to her as we dashed home.

My uncle did not arrive back until late that night. He was dripping wet. Germaine took his coat and his shoes in the hall.

‘Why isn’t he in bed?’ he said, jerking his chin at me.

Germaine shrugged as she climbed the stairs to the first floor. My uncle looked at me carefully, his wet hair glistening in the light but his expression solemn.

‘You should be in bed, you’ve got school tomorrow.’

Germaine reappeared with a dressing gown. My uncle put it on, slipped his feet into his slippers and came over to me.

‘Go on, son, go up to your room . . . for me.’

‘He knows about his father,’ Germaine said.

‘He knew before you did, but that’s no reason.’

‘He won’t get a wink of sleep until you tell him what you found out. This is about his father.’

Germaine’s remark irritated my uncle and he glared at her, but she did not turn away. She knew I was worried and felt that it was unfair to keep the truth from me.

My uncle put his hands on my shoulders.

‘We looked everywhere,’ he said. ‘We checked all the places he usually goes, but no one has seen him for a long time. Your mother doesn’t know where he is, she can’t understand why he would leave . . . We’ll keep looking for him. I’ve told Bliss to find three men I can trust to scour the city for him.’

‘I know where he is,’ I said. ‘He’s gone to make his fortune. He’ll come back in a shiny new car.’

My uncle glanced anxiously at Germaine, clearly afraid I was delirious, but she shook her head.

Up in my bedroom, I stared at the white expanse of ceiling, imagining it was a cinema screen, and pictured my father somewhere making his fortune, like in the movies Lucette’s father sometimes took us to see on Sunday afternoons. Germaine came up more than once to check on me and I pretended to be asleep. She came over to the bed, felt my forehead, adjusted my pillows, pulled the blankets up, then tiptoed out. The moment I heard the door shut, I threw off the covers and went back to staring at the ceiling. Spellbound as a little boy, I watched my father’s adventures.

The men my uncle sent out to find my father came back empty-handed. They checked the police stations, the hospitals, the brothels; they checked the rubbish tips and the souks; they questioned gravediggers and gangsters, drunks and horse traders. There was no word of my father.

Several weeks after his disappearance, I went to Jenane Jato without telling anyone. I knew my way around the city by now, and I wanted to go and see my sister without having to ask Germaine’s permission, without having my uncle take me there. When she saw me, my mother was angry. What I had done was stupid, she said, making me promise never to do it again. Jenane Jato was crawling with criminals. It was no place for a well-dressed boy; I might end up in a dark alley with my throat cut. I said I’d come to see if my father had come home. My mother told me I didn’t need to worry about my father any more, that Batoul had told her he was fine and well on his way to making a fortune. ‘When he comes back, he’ll stop off and pick you up from your uncle’s house and then come and collect your sister and me, and we’ll all drive off to a big house with gardens and fruit trees.’

Then she sent Badra’s eldest son to fetch Bliss so that he could walk me back to my uncle’s house.

This brusque dismissal by my mother troubled me for a long time. I felt as though I were to blame for all the misfortunes on earth.

FOR A whole month, I couldn’t fall asleep until I had watched my father’s adventures play out on the bedroom ceiling. I lay on my back, propped up on my pillows, and watched as a disjointed movie unfolded above my head. I imagined my father as a sultan surrounded by courtesans, as an outlaw plundering far-off lands, as a prospector discovering the biggest gold nugget of the century or a gangster in a three-piece suit, a cigar in the corner of his mouth.