Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

It was a dark, ugly morning and even the birds had stopped singing.

In turn, Mekki admitted that the time had come for us to reinvent ourselves elsewhere. He gathered us together in our shack, whose sheet-metal roof had been demolished by the snow.

‘I think we have enough money to try our luck far from here,’ he said, emptying our savings onto a scarf. ‘There’s nothing for us in this dump any more anyway.’

That was true. Half the ghetto had been devastated by the bad weather and the few vendors who had tried to cling on had given up one after the other, for lack of customers or supplies. The suppliers preferred to sell to Kasdir and run. The track leading to Graba was impassable and the paths were overrun by robbers. The most alarming thing of all was that epidemics were breaking out here and there. There was talk of typhoid and cholera. The deaths continued. The makeshift graveyard behind the military dumping ground bore witness to the extent of the disaster.

‘If you hadn’t already made up your mind, I’d have left of my own accord,’ my mother declared. ‘From the start, I’ve been telling myself you’d realise there was nothing for us here. But I suppose men are slower on the uptake than mules.’

My mother’s anger astonished us. She had always concealed her sorrows, like a hen sitting on her eggs, and now here she was expressing her discontent without pulling her punches. Her unexpected outburst was proof that we had reached rock bottom.

My mother shifted a pile of packages in a corner of the room, extracted a tightly bound cloth and untied it as we watched. A wonderfully carved solid gold kholkhal rolled across to our feet, with the head of a roaring lion at each end and calligraphic inscriptions of exceptional delicacy on the edges; a genuine work of art from a lost era when our women were all cherished sultanas.

‘Take it,’ she said to her brother.

Mekki shook his head. ‘I have no right to touch it. This jewel belonged to your great-grandmother.’

‘She doesn’t need it any more.’

‘It belongs to you now.’

‘I’m hungry, and I can’t eat it.’

‘No, I can’t … It’s all we have left of our history.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The only history is the present, and we’re dying. If it’s written that this jewel will stay in our family, it’ll come back to us … I’m sick of this shanty town. Find us somewhere to go where people are like people, so that we too can be what we were.’

She seized Mekki’s hand, put the impressive jewel in his palm and closed his fingers over it. With that, she left the room and got down to work putting some kind of order in her belongings.

I had often wondered what my mother really expected of life. I’m sure she expected nothing, any more than she expected something of death, except perhaps the relief at having finished with everything, absolutely everything, provided there was no heaven or hell afterwards.

Mekki set off the next day in search of somewhere to go. He hadn’t decided on anywhere, but was planning to ask the advice of people he met on the road. Ten days went by without any news of the head of our family. We couldn’t digest the crop we brought back from the scrub and we couldn’t sleep. Whenever a man passed our shack, we prayed it was Mekki. But it wasn’t. The waiting was even more agonising when the sun went down and we started to fear the worst.

One morning, Rokaya woke bathed in sweat, her eyes popping out of their sockets.

‘I had a bad dream, I shudder to think of it. I’m sure something has happened to Mekki.’

‘Since when have your dreams been premonitions?’ my mother said curtly.

‘What did you see?’ Nora asked Rokaya.

Rokaya shifted painfully on her mat. ‘Even if Mekki went to the ends of the earth, he’d have been back by now.’

‘He’ll be back,’ my mother cut in. ‘He promised us a quiet place, and quiet places aren’t so easy to find.’

‘I have a bad feeling about this, Taos. My heart has turned to jelly. You shouldn’t have given him your bracelet. With all those scoundrels on the roads —’

‘Shut up! You’ll bring him bad luck.’

‘It may already have happened. Mekki may be dead by now. Your jewel has caused his downfall, and ours.’

‘Shut your mouth, you witch. God can’t do that to us. He has no right.’

‘God has every right, Taos. Why are you blaspheming?’

My mother went out into the yard. She was furious and didn’t know what to reply.

I had never before heard her raise her voice or show a lack of respect to her elder sister.

Mekki did come back, exhausted but radiant. From a distance, I saw him waving to me enthusiastically and I realised our connection with Graba was coming to an end. We greeted Mekki like a gift from heaven. He begged us to let him eat first, then, having savoured our impatience, he announced that we were leaving for Oran. My mother remarked that Rokaya wouldn’t be able to stand such a journey in her state. Mekki reassured us: a haulier from Kasdir who had a delivery to make in Oran had agreed to take us on his lorry for a few francs.

We gathered together our knick-knacks and our utensils, our clothes and our prayers, and at dawn climbed into the back of the vehicle and closed our eyes in order not to see Graba recede into the distance; we were already elsewhere.

Mekki had found us a place to live on the north side of Medina Jedida — a Muslim quarter the city council called the ‘Village Nègre’ — a stone outhouse inside a courtyard, with a balcony and shutters on the windows, located on the corner of Rue du Général-Cérez and Boulevard Andrieu, opposite an artillery barracks.

The dwelling was spacious, consisting of two large connecting bedrooms, one of which looked out onto the street and the other onto a beaten-earth esplanade, and a narrow room for cooking; the toilets were in the courtyard, which we shared with the landlady, a Turkish widow, and a Kabyle family who ran a Moorish bath. We were very pleased with our new accommodation. Nora shed a few tears to bless the place.

It took me a while to familiarise myself with city life: the straight pavements, the roads that might prove fatal to the distracted, the panic instilled in me by the cars with their blaring horns. But I was in seventh heaven. Our house had a door with a lock and a number above it. As far as I was concerned, it was the best I could have hoped for.

My dreams were coming true.

The first few days, I enjoyed leaning with one foot against the wall and staying like that for hours so that the residents would know I lived in that beautiful residence with glass in the windows; that seemed to me as important as the fact that we were no longer obliged to fetch water from springs miles away but could draw it from the well in the courtyard. And at night, from my balcony, I would gaze out at the Moorish houses adorned with street lights, at their white slanting façades, the mashrabiyas behind which shadows moved in the light of gas lamps and, on the esplanade, quiet now, passers-by strolling here and there, carrying lanterns like giant fireflies borne on the wind. Spray from the sea, which I had never before seen in my life, was carried from the harbour and dampened my face with thousands of cooling droplets. I would breathe in the air until my lungs almost burst and catch myself humming unknown tunes, as if they had long been buried deep in my subconscious and now my joy had freed them all at once and launched them into the sky.

Disorientated by the forest of identical houses and the inextricable web of avenues, I undertook to walk up and down my street from end to end several times, in order to memorise the landmarks. When I had learnt how to find my door with my eyes closed, I extended my curiosity to the neighbouring streets, then to the surrounding boulevards, and within a week I knew Medina Jedida by heart.