Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

What can I say of my own dream? Like all dreams, it was captivating. It cradled my soul with such tenderness that I would have preferred it to my mother with my eyes closed. And my eyes were indeed closed, because I saw things only through my dream. But a dream isn’t brave and doesn’t think things through. It runs away when the hour of reckoning arrives; its principles crumble, and we come back down to earth as stupid as we were before we flew up to the sky, with, in addition, the annoyance of returning to square one and finding it even more unbearable than before. All at once, dusk seems like the smothering of our illusions, and the colour of night recalls the ashes of our vain passions, because none of our so-called wishes have been granted.

My mother used to say that the gods are only great because we see them from below. That is true of dreams too. Lifting my head from the shoes I was polishing, I would realise how small I was. My brush wasn’t a magic lamp, and no genie would choose a worn shoe to hide in. After six months of hard graft, I still didn’t have enough to buy myself a pair of trousers; the stone-houses-with-numbers-on-streets-with-names were receding like ships leaving for the land of plenty, while I was falling to pieces on my desert island with nothing but sand filtering through my fingers. Even if my fingers were green, had anyone ever seen flowers grow on sand dunes?

All it took was a little boy pointing at me for my dream to burst like an abscess. I was getting ready to have a bite to eat under a tree, sitting on my box, when I heard, ‘That’s him, officer!’ He was a European kid, dressed like a prince, the summer in his hair and the sea in his eyes. I had never seen him before and didn’t know what he wanted with me. But misfortune can never rest. It waits for you — then, tired of hanging about, comes looking for you. The policeman didn’t waste any time. His truncheon came down instinctively on my head. An Arab is guilty by nature. If you don’t know what he’s actually guilty of, there’s no point asking him. I had no idea what the little Roumi was accusing me of. I don’t suppose there was any point asking him either. My piece of bread stuck in my throat; the blood that spurted in my mouth didn’t help it go down. The policeman hit me several times with his truncheon and kicked me in the side. ‘You vermin!’ he cried. ‘You lousy piece of filth! Get a move on! Go back to your kennel and stay there. If I catch you prowling around this area again, I’ll put you in a cell until the rats have finished gnawing your bones.’

Dazed, my legs like jelly and my face split open, I set off at a run and left the city, forgetting my shoeshine box, my stupid daydreams and a whole lot of other things that only a peasant my age would have been naive enough to think possible.

I never set foot in Sidi Bel Abbès again.

*

Our stay in Graba continued.

Two years had passed and we were still there. Mekki would take me to work with him in order to keep his eye on me. He had made a counter out of wooden boards and we would stand side by side, selling not only soup but also hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes with onion.

I was seeing less of my friends now. We would meet in the same place, the abandoned orchard, but we were seldom all there at the same time; we would each take turns at skipping our evenings together.

Ramdane had developed a nasty swelling in the middle of his stomach. The healer had assured him that it was because of the loads he was carrying all day long. Ramdane refused to take the healer’s recommendations seriously. He wrapped a bandage around his waist to contain his hernia and resumed work. He was wasting away before our eyes. As for Gomri, he had found himself a ‘fiancée’ and was starting to neglect us so that he could meet up with her behind the wooded hillocks. Sid Roho and I followed him one evening to see her for ourselves. The fiancée was a girl from Kasdir, either a runaway or an orphan, because in those days a girl had to be one or the other to be out at night and go around with boys. She had a long, thin face tightly wrapped in a scarf, narrow shoulders, a flat chest and disproportionately long and spindly legs. She looked like a grasshopper. She kept laughing for no reason. Gomri, his hands between his thighs as if struggling to hold back an urge to pee, couldn’t take his eyes off her, even for a moment. It has to be said, the girl was quite a tease, a hot flame straight from the fires of hell. She would squirm in simulated embarrassment, her fingers in her mouth, cooing, showing more and more of her undeveloped breasts and going so far as to pull her dress up above her thighs to get Gomri even more excited. Hidden in the bushes, we watched this little performance in perfect silence, Sid Roho massaging his rod and me thinking about Nora.

The winter of 1925 was terrible. It hadn’t been so cold in the region in living memory. After the torrential rains that flooded our shacks, the ground was covered in ice, turning Graba into a skating rink. It snowed three days running, without stopping. People were up to their waists in the snow, and children stayed at home. Many straw huts had collapsed beneath the rain and some had burnt down because of the logs lit inside. For two weeks, the stalls remained closed and the market empty. Dozens died of hunger, dozens more of cold. When the snow melted, the place turned into a mud bath, causing more deaths and the collapse of homes. When the first provisions reached us, people went mad; Ramdane’s crippled father was trampled in the stampede.

My family didn’t escape unscathed. Nora caught a bad cold and almost died. Then Mekki and my mother were sick for a whole week, throwing up even the rancid water they drank, which was the only thing we could put in our mouths anyway. As for me, I had a high fever and my body was covered in boils. At night, I had visions of cockroaches crawling around me. Then, one by one, we came back to life. All except Aunt Rokaya, whose knees had stiffened. She couldn’t bend her legs or sit properly. We thought she was going to die, and it was almost as if she had. Her lower limbs no longer responded. She lay on her mat, as stiff as a piece of wood. Seeing Nora and my mother drag her behind the thicket to help her relieve herself, I realised the full extent of human misery.

Many families had gathered their meagre belongings and set off to some new hell. They no longer had a roof over their heads and didn’t see any hope of rebuilding their lives in Graba. Ramdane was among those who left. He piled his mother and siblings onto a cart and went off to bury his father in his native douar. He would never return.

Sid Roho mourned the loss of both his parents, carried off by hunger and illness. He made sure he said goodbye to me before leaving.

‘Sorry about your parents,’ I said.

‘It’s the survivors you should feel sorry for, Turambo. My parents’ act has finished and the curtain has come down. I’m the one still up on stage like an idiot, not knowing what to do with my grief.’

‘It is written,’ I said, unable to think what else to say.

‘Yes, but who by? My grandfather used to say that fate only strikes those who’ve tried everything and failed. If you have a broken arm, nothing can help you accept that. I don’t think my parents ever tried anything. They died because all they did was endure what they should have fought against.’

‘And where do you plan to go?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t care. When I’m tired of travelling, I’ll stop. The world is vast, and anyone who’s known Graba can go anywhere he wants, knowing the worst is always behind him.’

I walked with him to the ‘Arab’ road and watched him limp off in search of his destiny, a bundle on his head and his shoeshine box over his shoulder.