Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

‘I don’t want to end up in prison,’ I said.

‘Some people get away with it.’

‘Maybe, but it’s haram.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Turambo. It’s not having any money that’s haram. How do you think people survive around here? When you have nothing, it doesn’t matter what you turn your hand to.’

‘Nobody’s ever stolen anything in my family. My uncle would throw me out if he discovered I was stealing.’

Sid Roho tapped his temple with his finger, but didn’t insist.

Two days later, he came back to see me with a box slung over his shoulder.

‘So you want to earn your living by the honest sweat of your brow? All right. I’m going to teach you my old trade of shoeshine boy. There’s only money to be made from it in the city, in the European quarters. How would you like to come with me to Sidi Bel Abbès?’

‘Oh, no, not the city. We’d get lost.’

‘There’s no reason we should. I go there all the time.’

‘My uncle says people get run over by cars there every day.’

‘Your uncle knows nothing about the city. He’s never walked on a pavement in his life … Come on. Sidi Bel Abbès is quite something, you’ll see. It isn’t meant for the likes of us, but there’s nothing to say we can’t go there.’

‘No, those big places scare me.’

‘My grandfather used to say: a man born in hell doesn’t fear volcanoes. Trust me. I’ll show you things you could never imagine. You can speak a bit of French, can’t you?’

‘Of course. I grew up on a colonial farm. My father worked in the stables and my mother did the housework. Xavier let me play with his kids. I can do arithmetic too. Division’s difficult, but as far as addition and subtraction go, all I need is a blackboard and a piece of chalk.’

‘All right, all right, no need to go on about it,’ he cut in, sounding jealous. ‘Will you come with me to the city, yes or no?’

I still hesitated.

‘Learn to make up your own mind, Turambo,’ he went on. ‘Someone once said: if you want to get to the moon, start climbing now.’

Sid Roho managed to convince me and we ran off to wash our faces in a drinking trough where a mule was quenching its thirst. Then Sid Roho took me to his place to try on a shirt, a pair of trousers that reached down to my calves and sandals with hemp soles.

‘In your country clothes, they’d put you in the dog pound before you got to town.’

Sidi Bel Abbès was a real shock to me.

My universe had been limited to Turambo and the colonial estate. As far as I was concerned, the Xaviers’ farm had been the height of affluence, comfort and modernity. I’d never seen anything as opulent. I’d spend hours gazing at the big house with its tiled roof, its wide front steps bordered by balustrades, its big front door of carved wood opening onto a light-flooded reception room, its French windows painted green looking out on a vast flowery veranda where, on Sunday, the owner and his guests ate grilled meat and drank ice-cold orangeade. That, I had thought, was the pinnacle of fine living, the acme of success, a privilege so rare that only those blessed by the gods could enjoy it.

I had never set foot in a city before and had only a vague notion of Europeans, confusing them with sultans from the stories Aunt Rokaya told Nora and me when we were hungry or had a fever.

For a boy with limited horizons like me, there were only two, diametrically opposed worlds: the world of the colonial Xavier, a tall, strapping man who had orchards, a carriage drawn by a magnificent thoroughbred, and obsequious servants, and who ate méchoui on every public holiday; and the world of Turambo, where time seemed to have stood still, a sad, joyless, deadly place, without prospects, where people went to ground like moles.

And now here was Sidi Bel Abbès, which swept away my points of reference with a lordly hand by revealing a world I had never suspected, made up of paved streets, proper street lighting instead of the old-fashioned gas lamps we had, pavements lined with trees, shop windows displaying fine lingerie that would have frozen me with embarrassment just imagining it on Nora’s body, bistros with sun-drenched terraces and people in their best clothes puffing contentedly on their pipes.

I stood there open-mouthed for a long time, watching the carriages coming and going at a syncopated rhythm; the cars parked here and there when they weren’t backfiring along the boulevard; the women in colourful, figure-hugging dresses, some on the arms of distinguished gentlemen, others sheltering beneath pretty hats, all breathtakingly beautiful; the officers striding with a martial air in their freshly pressed uniforms, chests thrown out; and the children in short trousers running about like will-o’-the-wisps on the square which was bedecked with flags.

This discovery would remain engraved in my memory, like a prophetic revelation.

For me, Sidi Bel Abbès wasn’t so much a chance encounter as proof that a different life, poles apart from mine, was possible. I think it was that day that I started dreaming — I certainly couldn’t remember having done so before. I would even say that dreams, like hopes, were barely familiar to me, so convinced was I that everyone’s role was determined in advance, that there were those who had been born to strut in the limelight and those who were condemned to fade away in the wings until they disappeared. I was bewildered, charmed and frustrated all at once …

Sidi Bel Abbès awoke feelings in me I had never suspected. I was faced with a challenge. To be or not to be. To make a choice or give up. The city wasn’t rejecting me, it was opening my eyes, removing my blinkers, showing me new prospects; I already knew what I no longer wanted. Well before it was time to go back home, I was certain I couldn’t settle for Graba. I was determined to do anything, even commit a sin, in order to rebuild my life elsewhere, in a city where sounds had their own music and the people and the streets smelt of luck and hope.

While Sid Roho set to work shining shoes, I couldn’t help lingering over my discoveries, absorbing everything down to the smallest detail, like a dried-up sponge thrown suddenly into a stream. That neat church regally watching over the square, those shop windows reflecting back at me my own bad fortune, and those dazzling girls who seemed to dance as they walked, and those avenues so clean that no dirt dared land on them, and those grassy verges strewn with roses, and those children, the same age as me, who had everything they needed, in their sailor suits and caps, with socks up to their knees and their feet in soft shoes, and who passed me without seeing me, racing around like streaks of pure happiness! Watching those children moving about in such a carefree way, I told myself, without wishing to offend the saints, that their God was more considerate than ours and that, if paradise was indeed promised to us rather than to them, a semblance of decency in our lives wouldn’t have gone amiss.

‘Hey, don’t just stand there gawping, come back down to earth. This is real life, Turambo. Watch how I handle the brush if you want to learn the trade.’

Sid Roho was putting the finishing touches to a soldier’s leather boots. After polishing them, he went over them with a cloth, his wrists moving as fast as pistons. The soldier ignored us. With his hands in his pockets and a lopsided smile on his face, he was ogling two young girls on the opposite pavement.

‘There you are, Monsieur. Your boots are as good as new.’

The soldier dropped a coin on the ground and crossed the road, whistling.

‘Do you think I’ll ever live in a city like this?’ I asked, my eyes full of all the colourful details.

‘Who knows? My grandfather used to say that what’s difficult isn’t necessarily impossible.’