Yasmina Khadra - What the day owes the nigth

‘Can I help you, monsieur?’

She was behind me. Fragile, ghostly, she had appeared out of the half-light just as she had on the night of the fire. A night she still wore about her, her black dress, black hair, black eyes bearing mute witness to a grief a year had done nothing to diminish. In the darkness, I had to peer to make her out. She was standing three feet away and I saw that she had changed, that her beauty had withered. She was a shadow of the woman she had been, a heartbroken widow who paid no attention to her appearance. Life had taken from her more than it could ever repay. I immediately realised my mistake. I was not welcome here. I was a knife in a wound. Her icy aloofness bewildered me and made me realise just how wrong I had been to think I could come here and make right something that I myself had shattered. And then there had been the word monsieur, peremptory, disarming, unendurable, hurling me into an abyss, wiping me from the face of the earth. I truly believed that she had survived that tragedy only so that she might hate me. She did not need to say it; I could read it in the blank, expressionless eyes, which repelled me, dared me to try to hold her gaze.

‘What do you want?’

‘Me?’ I said stupidly.

‘Who else? You came by last week and the week before and almost every day in between. What are you playing at?’

I felt my throat tighten. I couldn’t swallow.

‘I was just passing . . . I thought I saw you through the window . . . I wasn’t sure . . . I wanted to say hello . . . to talk to you . . . but I didn’t dare . . .’

‘Have you ever dared, Younes? Even once in your life?’

She realised she had hurt me. Something stirred in those dark eyes filled with night. Something like a shooting star that flickered out as soon as it appeared.

‘So you found your tongue. All the time I’ve known you, you’ve had nothing to say. What did you want to talk to me about?’

Only her lips moved; her face, her pale, slender hands, her body remained motionless. Nor were they really words, just a rush of breath, like a spell, like a curse . . .

‘Maybe I’ve come at a bad time.’

‘I hope there’ll never be another time. I want this over with. What did you want to talk to me about?’

‘About us.’ My words seemed to come by themselves.

A faint smile played on her lips.

‘About us? Was there ever an us?’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘You don’t know how sorry I am. I’m so, so . . . Do you think you can ever forgive me?’

‘What difference would it make?’

‘Émilie . . . I’m so sorry.’

‘They’re just words, Younes. Oh, there was a time when one word from you would have changed everything, but you couldn’t bring yourself to say it. You need to understand that it’s over.’

‘What’s over, Émilie?’

‘Something that never really began.’

I was shattered. My head was exploding, I couldn’t hear my heartbeat, couldn’t feel a pulse in my temples. I could hardly believe I was still standing.

She stepped towards me as though emerging from the wall behind her.

‘What did you think, Younes? Did you think I’d rush into your arms? Why? Was I expecting you to come? Of course not. You never allowed me to expect anything from you. You took my love for you and strangled it before it could take flight. Just like that . . . My love for you was dead before it even hit the ground.’

I said nothing. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I might burst into tears. I realised now the pain I had put her through, realised that I had crushed her hopes, her dreams, trampled her wholesome, innocent joy, the artless confidence that had once set her eyes ablaze.

‘Can I ask you something, Younes?’

There was a lump in my throat, all I could do was nod.

‘Why? Why did you turn me away? If there was someone else, I might have understood. But you never married . . .’

Taking advantage of a moment’s inattention, a tear slipped through my lashes and trickled down my cheek; I did not have the courage or the strength to stop it. Not a single muscle in my body responded.

‘It tormented me night and day,’ she went on, her voice lifeless. ‘What was it about me that made you reject me? What did I do wrong? He doesn’t love you, I told myself, it’s as simple as that. There’s nothing wrong with you, he just doesn’t love you. But I didn’t believe it. You were devastated after I got married. It was then I realised there was something you weren’t telling me . . . What are you hiding, Younes? What is it that you can’t bring yourself to tell me?’

The dam burst; tears spilled out, coursing down my face, my neck, and as I wept, I felt everything drain away: the pain, the remorse, the deceit. I cried and cried and never wanted to stop.

‘You see,’ she said. ‘You still can’t bring yourself to talk to me.’

By the time I looked up, Émilie had vanished as though she had been swallowed up by the wall behind her, by the encroaching darkness. The bookshop was deserted but for a trace of her perfume drifting between the shelves, and in another aisle, two old ladies who stared at me pityingly. I wiped my tears away and walked out of the bookshop feeling as though a fog from nowhere was enveloping the last rays of sunlight.

IT WAS seven p.m. on a spring day in late April 1959, the sky licked by the last rays of sunset as a lone cloud, straying from the flock, hung suspended over the village waiting for a gust of wind to carry it away. I was stacking boxes in the back office and getting ready to close. When I came back into the shop, I found a young man standing in the doorway to the street. He was nervous, and clutched at his jacket as though hiding something.

‘I’m not here to hurt you . . .’ he stammered in Arabic.

He was sixteen, perhaps seventeen; his face was pale and I could clearly see a fine down on his upper lip. He looked like a runaway. He was skinny as a rail and wore trousers ripped at the knees, muddy boots, and a scarf around his throat.

‘It is closing time, isn’t it?’

‘What do you want?’

He opened his jacket to reveal a pistol tucked into his belt. My blood ran cold.

‘I was sent by El-Jabha – the FLN. Close up the shop. Nothing’s going to happen to you if you do what you’re told.’

‘What the hell is this about?’

‘It’s about your country.’

When I hesitated, he drew the gun though he did not aim it at me. He repeated his orders. I pulled down the shutters, my eyes fixed on the barrel of the gun.

‘Now go back inside.’

He was almost as scared as I was. Terrified that his fear might get the better of his sense, I put my hands up to reassure him.

‘Turn on the lights, then close the shutter on the window.’

I did as he said. In the silence of the back room, my heart hammered like the piston of a runaway train.

‘I know your mother is upstairs. Is there anyone else in the house?’

‘I’m expecting friends,’ I lied.

‘Then we’ll wait for them together.’

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and jerked his head for me to go upstairs. As I climbed the stairs, I felt him push the barrel of the gun into my side.

‘Like I said, nothing will happen to you if you do what you’re told.’

‘Put the gun away, I promise I’ll—’

‘You don’t give the orders here, and don’t go by how old I look – there’s more than one who didn’t live to regret it. I’m an agent of the Front de Libération Nationale. They think you can be trusted; don’t disappoint them.’

‘Can I ask what they want with me?’

‘Do I have to remind you we’re at war?’