Yasmina Khadra - What the day owes the nigth

‘Oh, yeah.’ Joe twisted his hat nervously in his hands.

‘I wouldn’t mind going with you,’ Jean-Christophe ventured. ‘I’ve never done anything serious with a woman. You think you could arrange it?’

‘Are you crazy?’ said Simon. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of going into a dive like that with all the diseases the whores have got?’

‘I’m with Simon,’ said Fabrice. ‘I don’t think we should go. Besides, we told my mother we’d behave ourselves.’

Jean-Christophe shrugged, leaned over to André and whispered something in his ear. André gave him a superior look and said, ‘I can get you into Hell itself if you want.’

Relieved and excited, Jean-Christophe turned to me.

‘What about you, Jonas, are you coming?’

‘Absolutely . . .’

I was more shocked than anyone to hear myself say this.

The red-light district In Oran was behind the theatre on the Rue de l’Aqueduc, a squalid alleyway with stairs at either end that reeked of piss and teemed with drunks. Hardly had we set foot in the alley than I felt horribly uncomfortable, and it took every ounce of energy not to turn tail and run. Joe and André raced ahead, eager to get inside. Jean-Christophe followed close behind. He was clearly intimidated and his attempt at seeming offhand was unconvincing. He turned round from time to time and winked at me, to which I responded with a nervous smile, but the moment we passed anyone shifty we swerved out of the way and made as if to leave. The brothels were all lined up on the same part of the alley, their front doors painted in garish colours. The Rue de l’Aqueduc was heaving; there were soldiers, sailors, furtive Arab men terrified of being spotted by a neighbour, barefoot boys running errands, Senegalese pimps with flick knives tucked into their belts watching over their livestock, ‘native’ soldiers wearing tall red fezzes – a feverish yet somehow muted tumult.

The madame at the Camélia was a giant of a woman with a voice that could make the earth quake. She ruled her demesne with a rod of iron and was bawling out an ill-mannered customer on the steps as we arrived.

‘You fucked up again, Gégé, and that’s not good. You want to come back here and see my girls? Well, it’s down to you. If you keep acting like a thug, you’ll never set foot in my house again. You know me, Gégé, when I put that little red cross next to someone’s name, I might just as well be digging his grave. You understand what I’m saying, or do I need to draw you a picture?’

‘Don’t act like you’re doing me some big favour,’ Gégé protested. ‘I come here with my cash, all I’m asking is that your whore does what she’s told.’

‘You can stick your money up your arse, Gégé. This is a brothel, not a torture chamber. If you don’t like the service, you can take your custom elsewhere. Because if you try something like that again, I’ll rip your heart out with my bare hands.’

Gégé, who was almost a dwarf, rose up on the tips of his shoes and glared at the madame, purple with rage. Then he rocked back on to his heels and, livid at having been publicly ticked off by a woman, elbowed his way past us and disappeared into the crowd.

‘Serves him right,’ yelled a soldier. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere.’

‘That goes for you too, Sergeant,’ the madame said. ‘You’re no saint yourself.’

The soldier shrank back. The madame was clearly in a bad mood, and André realised that things might not go his way. He managed to persuade her to let Jean-Christophe in, given his height, but could do nothing for me.

‘He’s just a kid, Dédé,’ she said. ‘He still smells of mother’s milk. I can turn a blind eye to your blonde friend here, but this little cherub with his blue eyes, there’s no way. He’d be raped in the corridor before he even got to a room.’

André made no attempt to insist. The madame was not the sort to go back on a decision. She told me I could wait for my friends behind the counter, instructing me not to touch anything or speak to anyone. I felt relieved. Now that I had seen the brothel, I didn’t want to go any farther; the place turned my stomach.

In the waiting room, veiled by curtains of smoke, the hunters, looking shrunken and dazed, eyed their prey. Some of the men were drunk and they grumbled and jostled. The prostitutes were displayed on a long upholstered bench in an alcove carved into the wall of the corridor that led to the bedrooms. They sat facing the customers, some of them barely dressed, others squeezed into see-through corselets. It looked like a painting of ruined concubines by a despondent Delacroix. There were big girls rippling with rolls of fat, breasts stuffed into bras the size of hammocks; scrawny women with dark sunken eyes who looked as though they had been dragged from their deathbeds; brunettes in cheap blonde wigs; blondes wearing so much make-up they looked like clowns, one breast casually exposed. The women sat in silence, patiently scratching their crotches, smoking, eyeing the cattle opposite.

Sitting behind the counter, I contemplated this world and regretted ever having ventured inside. It smelled of adulterated wine and the stench of rutting flesh. A terrible tension hung in the room like some noxious gas. One spark, one misjudged comment, one wrong look and the whole place could go up . . . The decor, although contrived and naïve, did its best to be cheery: delicate wall hangings framed with velvet, gilded mirrors, cheap paintings of nymphs dressed as Eve, matching lamps and mosaic walls, empty love seats in the alcoves. But the customers seemed oblivious to all this; they could see only the half-naked girls on the long bench. Veins throbbing in their necks, all but pawing the ground, they were eager to get started.

I was beginning to get bored. Jean-Christophe disappeared with some fat old woman, followed by Joe leading two girls caked in make-up. André had vanished.

The owner offered me a bowl of toasted almonds and promised that when I came of age I could have her prettiest girl.

‘No hard feelings, kid?’

‘No hard feelings, Madame.’

‘You’re sweet . . . and for God’s sake don’t call me Madame, it gives me constipation.’

Calmer now, the woman was trying to make peace. I was terrified she might do me a ‘favour’ and allow me to choose from the sweaty flesh laid out on the bench.

‘Sure you’re not angry with me?’

‘I’m not, honestly,’ I yelped, now convinced she would overlook my age and pick out a girl for me. ‘Actually,’ I said quickly, to cover every eventuality, ‘I didn’t want to come in the first place. I’m not ready.’

‘You’re right, kid. When it comes to dealing with women, you’re never ready . . . There’s lemonade behind you if you’re thirsty. It’s on the house.’

She left me and disappeared into the corridor to make sure everything was okay.

It was then that I saw her. She had just finished with a client and gone back to sit with her co-workers on the bench. Her arrival created a ripple in the waiting room. One burly soldier loudly announced that he was first in the queue, causing a storm of protests. I paid no attention. Suddenly the noise in the room seemed to die away; even the room had vanished. There was only her. It was as if a shooting star had come from nowhere and traced a halo of light around her. I recognised her at once, though this was the last place I would have expected to see her. She did not seem to have aged at all. Her body, in a tight-fitting, lowcut dress, was still that of an adolescent girl, her hair spilled over her shoulders just as I remembered it, her cheekbones were as perfectly chiselled as ever. It was Hadda . . . Hadda the beautiful, the woman I had secretly loved, the object of my first boyish fantasies. How could Hadda, who simply by stepping into the courtyard of our house lit it up like the sun, have wound up in this seedy dive?