Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

I climbed onto a promontory to gaze at the ships in the harbour. Four freighters were moored at the quays, filled to the brim with corn; their funnels, as red as a clown’s nose, belched clouds of black smoke into the air. A few months earlier, I had come to this place to gaze at the sea; I had found it as fascinating and mysterious as the sky and had wondered which took its inspiration from the other. I had stood on this same rocky outcrop, my eyes open wide, astonished at the blue plain stretching off into the distance. It was the first time I had seen the sea. A painter who was reproducing on his canvas the potbellied freighters and the little steamboats that seemed as tiny as fleas beside them had said to me: The sea is a font where all the prayers that don’t reach the Lord fall as tears, and have done for millions of years. Of course, that painter was trying to be witty. Yet this time, on the same promontory, where nobody had set up an easel, those words came back to me as I once again saw, going round and round in slow motion, the image of my father closing the cemetery gate behind me, and those stupid, beautiful words broke my heart.

I remained on the promontory until nightfall. I was overwhelmed by grief, and I was sinking into it. I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t have stood the looks I’d get from my mother and uncle. I hated them. They had known and hadn’t said anything. The monsters! … I needed a culprit, and I wasn’t big enough for the role. I was the victim, more to be pitied than to be charged. I needed somebody to point a finger at. My father? He was the misdeed. Not the exhibit, but the act itself, the crime, the murder. I saw only my mother and Mekki in the dock. At last I understood why they had fallen silent that time when I had caught them talking about my father. They should have taken me into their confidence. I would have been able to bear the blow. They hadn’t done so. And now I held them responsible for all the misfortunes of the world.

That night, I didn’t go home.

I went and knocked on Gino’s door.

As soon as he saw the expression on my face, Gino guessed that if he didn’t let me in, I would throw myself into the abyss and never come back up again.

His mother was asleep with her mouth open.

He led me to the little courtyard, which was lit by a lantern. The sky was glittering with constellations. In the distance, you could hear people quarrelling. Gino took me by the wrist and I told him everything, all in one go, without pausing to catch my breath. He listened right to the end, without interrupting me and without letting go of my hand.

When I had finished, he said, ‘A lot of people came back from the war hardly knowing themselves any more, Turambo. They went off in one piece and returned having left a part of their souls in the trenches.’

‘It would have been better if the whole of him had stayed there.’

‘Don’t be hard on him. He’s still your father, and you don’t know what he suffered over there. I’m sure he’s suffering even now. You don’t flee your family when you survive the war.’

‘He did.’

‘That proves that he no longer knows where he is.’

‘I would have preferred him to be dead. What memory am I going to have of him now? A cemetery gate shutting in my face?’

His fingers closed a little more over mine. ‘I’d give anything to believe that my father was still alive somewhere,’ he said sadly. ‘A living man can always come home eventually, but not a dead man.’

Gino said other things too, but I’d stopped listening to him. Only the creaking of the gate continued to echo in my head. However much my father tried to retreat behind it, I could clearly distinguish him as if in a one-way mirror, ghostly, shabby and grotesque. He disgusted me. I would close my eyes and there he was; I would open them and he was still there, in his scarecrow’s suit, as inexpressive as a wooden skeleton. What had happened to him? Was it really him? What was war? An afterlife from which you returned deprived of your soul, your heart and your memory? These questions were eating me alive. I would have liked them to finish me off or else help me understand. But there was nothing. I endured them and that was all. I was sick of not finding a semblance of an answer to them, or any kind of meaning.

Gino suggested I sleep in his room. I told him I wouldn’t be able to breathe, that I preferred the courtyard. He brought me an esparto mat and a blanket and lay down next to me on a piece of carpet. We stared up at the sky and listened out for the noises of the city. When the streets grew quiet, Gino started snoring. I waited to doze off in my turn, but anger caught up with me and I didn’t sleep a wink.

Gino got up early. He made coffee for his mother, made sure she had everything she needed and told me I could stay in the apartment if I wanted. I declined the offer because I had no desire to meet my mother, who would be arriving soon. She came at seven every day to do the housework for the Ramouns. Gino didn’t have any other suggestion to make. He had to go to work. I walked with him to Place Sébastopol. He promised to see me at the end of the day and took his leave. I stood there on the pavement, not knowing what to do with myself. I felt ill at ease and ached all over. The thought of going home repelled me.

I went up onto the heights of Létang to look at the sea. It was as wild as the din in my head. Then I went to Boulevard Marceau to watch the trams with their passengers clinging to the guardrails like strings of garlic. At the station, I listened to the trains arriving in a screech of whistles and pouring their contingents of travellers out onto the platforms. From time to time, an idea would cross my mind and I would imagine myself getting on a train and going somewhere, anywhere, far from this feeling of disgust I was dragging around like a ball and chain. I wanted to hit everything that moved. If anybody looked at me, I was ready to charge.

I only felt a little calmer when Gino returned.

Gino was my stability, my crutch. Every evening, he would take me to the cinema to see Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Musketeers, Tarzan of the Apes, King Kong and horror films. Then we would go to a cabaret in Rue d’Austerlitz in the Derb to hear Messaoud Médioni sing. I would then start to feel a little better. But in the morning, when Gino went to work, my unease would return and I would try and shake it off in the bustle of the streets.

Pierre came looking for me. I told him it was all over between us. He called me an idiot and told me that the ‘Yid’ was brainwashing me. I couldn’t control what my fist did next. I felt my ‘pimp’s’ nose give at the end of my arm. Surprised by my action, Pierre fell backwards, half stunned. He lifted his hand to his face and looked incredulously at his bloodstained fingers. ‘I should have expected that,’ he grunted in a voice shaking with bile. ‘I try to help you and this is how you thank me. Well, what can you expect of an Arab? No loyalty or gratitude.’

He stood up, gave me a black eye and finally left me alone.

We were supposed to be going to Ras el-Aïn for a walk, but Gino suddenly changed his mind. ‘I have things to sort out at home,’ he said by way of excuse. I walked home with him. And my mother was there, on Boulevard Mascara, a glove in one hand and a bowl of water beside her; she was just finishing washing my friend’s mother. What was the meaning of this strange coincidence? I asked Gino. He replied that I was wrong to avoid my family. I hadn’t set foot in Rue du Général-Cérez for nine months, not since the incident in the Jewish cemetery. I asked Gino if this was a roundabout way of getting rid of me. He told me his home was mine and that I could stay there as long as I wanted, but that my family needed me, and that it wasn’t a good idea to fall out with them.