Yasmina Khadra: The Angels Die

The silence is holding the prison in suspense. I know nobody’s asleep in the cells, that the guards are close by, that my hour is stamping with impatience at the end of the corridor …

Suddenly, a door squeaks in the hushed tranquillity of the stones and muffled footsteps move along the floor.

Chief Borselli almost knocks his chair over as he stands to attention. In the anaemic light of the corridor, shadows ooze onto the floor like trails of ink.

Far, far away, as if from a confused dream, the call of the muezzin echoes.

‘ Rabbi m’âak ,’ cries one of the inmates.

My guts are in a tangle, like snakes writhing inside a pot. Something takes hold of me that I can’t explain. The hour has come. Nobody can escape his destiny. Destiny? Only exceptional people have one. Common mortals just have fate … The muezzin’s call sweeps over me like a gust of wind, shattering my senses in a swirl of panic. As my fear reaches its height, I dream about walking through the wall and running out into the open without turning back. To escape what? To go where? I’m trapped like a rat. Even if my legs won’t carry me, the guards will make sure they hand me over in due form to the executioner.

The clenching of my bowels threatens my underpants. My mouth fills with the stench of soil; in it, I detect a foretaste of the grave that’s getting ready to digest me until I turn to dust … It’s stupid to end up like this at the age of twenty-seven. Did I even have time to live? And what kind of life? … You’re going to make a mess of things again, and I don’t feel like cleaning up after you any more , Gino used to warn me … What’s done is done; no remorse can cushion the fall. Luck is like youth. Everybody has his share. Some grab it on the wing, others let it slip through their fingers, and others are still waiting for it when it’s long past … What did I do with mine?

I was born to flashes of lightning. On a stormy, windy night. With fists for hitting and a mouth for biting. I took my first steps surrounded by birdshit and grabbed hold of thorns to lift myself up.

Alone.

I grew up in a hellish shanty town outside Sidi Bel Abbès. In a yard where the mice were the size of puppies. Rags and hunger were my body and soul. Up before dawn at an age when I should have been carefree, I was already hard at work. Come rain or shine, I had to find a grain of corn to put in my mouth so that I could slave away again the following day without passing out. I worked without a break, often for peanuts, and by the time I got home in the evening I was dead beat. I didn’t complain. That’s just the way it was. Apart from the kids squabbling naked in the dust and the tramps you saw rotting under the bridges, their veins ravaged by cheap wine, everybody between the ages of seven and seventy-seven who could stand on their own two feet was expected to work themselves to death.

The place I worked at was a shop bang in the middle of a dangerous area, the haunt of thugs and lowlifes. It wasn’t really a shop, more like a disused, worm-eaten dugout, where Zane, who was the worst kind of crook, squatted. My job wasn’t hard: I tidied the shelves, swept the floor, delivered baskets twice my own weight, or kept a lookout whenever a widow up to her eyes in debt agreed to lift her dress at the back of the shop in return for a piece of sugar.

It was a strange time.

I saw prophets walking on water, living people who were more lifeless than corpses, riffraff sunk so low that neither demons nor the Angel of Death dared look for them there.

Even though Zane was raking it in, he never stopped complaining in order to protect himself from the evil eye, with the excuse that business was bad, that people were too broke even to have money for a rope to hang themselves with, that his creditors were shamelessly bleeding him dry, and I’d take his complaints as holy writ and feel sorry for him. Of course, to save face, he’d sometimes, either by chance or by mistake, slip a coin into my hand, but the day I was so exhausted that I asked for my back pay, he kicked me up the backside and sent me back to my mother with nothing but a promise to give me a hiding if he ever caught me hanging round the area again.

Before I reached puberty, I felt as if I’d come full circle, convinced I’d seen everything, experienced everything, endured everything.

As they say, I was immune.

I was eleven years old, and for me that was equivalent to eleven life sentences. A complete nonentity, as anonymous as a shadow, turning round and round like an endless screw. The reason I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel was because there wasn’t one: I was simply travelling through an endless darkness …

Chief Borselli fiddles with the lock of my cell, removes the padlock, opens the door with an almighty creak and stands aside to let in the ‘committee’. The prison warden, my lawyer, two officials in suits and ties, a pale-faced barber with a bag at his side and the imam all advance towards me, flanked by two guards who look as if they’ve been carved out of granite.

Their formality makes my blood run cold.

Chief Borselli pushes his chair towards me and motions me to sit down. I don’t move. I can’t move. Someone says something to me. I don’t hear. All I see is lips moving. The two guards help me up and put me on the chair. In the silence, my heartbeat echoes like a mournful drum roll.

The barber slips behind me. His ratlike fingers ease my shirt collar away from my neck. My eyes focus on the shiny, freshly polished shoes around me. By now, fear has taken hold of my whole being. The end has started! It was written , except that I’m illiterate.

If I’d suspected for a single second that the curtain would come down like this, I’d never have waited for the last act: I’d have shot straight ahead like a meteorite; I’d have become one with nothingness and thrown God Himself off my trail. Unfortunately, none of these ‘if’s lead anywhere; the proof is that they always arrive too late. Every mortal man has his moment of truth, a moment designed to catch him unawares, that’s the rule. Mine took me by surprise. It seems to me like a distortion of my prayers, a non-negotiable aberration, a miscarriage of justice: whatever shape it takes, it always has the last word, and there’s no appeal.

The barber starts cutting the collar off my shirt. Every snip of his scissors cuts a void in my flesh.

In extraordinarily precise flashes, memories come back to me. I see myself as a child, wearing a hessian sack instead of a gandoura, running barefoot along dusty paths. After all , as my mother used to say, when nature, in its infinite goodness, gives us a thick layer of dirt on our feet, we can easily do without sandals . My mother wasn’t far wrong. Neither nettles nor brambles slowed down my frantic running. What exactly was I running after? … My brain echos with the rants of Chawala, a kind of turbaned madman who, winter and summer, wore a flea-ridden cloak and a gutter-cleaner’s boots. Tall, with a voluminous beard and yellow eyes painted with kohl, he liked to get up in the square, point his finger at people and predict the horrible things in store for them. I’d spend hours following him from one platform to another, so impressed I thought he was a prophet … I see Gino, my friend Gino, my dear friend Gino, his incredulous eyes wide open in the darkness of that damned stairwell as his mother’s voice rings out over the thunder: Promise me you’ll take care of him, Turambo. Promise me. I’d like to go in peace … And Nora, damn it! Nora. I thought she was mine, but nothing belonged to me. Funny how a helping hand could have changed the course of my life. I wasn’t asking for the moon, only for my share of luck, otherwise how can you believe there’s any kind of justice in this world? … The images become muddled in my head before giving in to the clicking of the scissors. In the cosmic deafness of the prison, the sound seems to suck out the air and time.