Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

I was getting ready to leave when my mother grabbed me by the wrist. ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said. She put on her veil and motioned me to follow her. We did not exchange a word in the street. She walked ahead and I trailed behind, wondering what new revelation awaited me round the corner.

When we got home, my mother said, ‘We’re not hard on you, it’s life that’s hard on all of us.’ I asked her why she hadn’t told me the truth about my father, and she replied that there was nothing to say about him. And that was all. My mother went into the kitchen to make dinner.

Nora joined me in the next room. She was even more beautiful than before and her big eyes threw me into disarray.

‘We missed you,’ she admitted, turning away in embarrassment.

She’s growing up too fast, I thought. She was almost a woman now. Her body had blossomed; it demanded celebration.

‘I’m back, that’s all that matters,’ I said.

Nora smelt good, like a meadow in spring. Her black hair fell over her round shoulders and her chest carried the promise of maturity.

We could think of nothing further to say.

Our silence spoke for us.

I was in love with her …

Aunt Rokaya opened her emaciated arms to me. ‘Silly fool!’ she scolded me affectionately. ‘You should never be angry with your family. How could you live with your friend so close to here and ignore us?’ She undid a scarf hanging from her blouse and handed me the silver ring that was in it. ‘This belonged to your grandfather. The day he died, he took it off his finger and made me promise to give it to my son. I never had a son of my own. And you’re more than a nephew to me.’

Aunt Rokaya had grown thinner. In addition to the paralysis of the lower limbs that confined her to her straw mattress, she complained of whistling in her ears and terrible headaches. The amulets the quacks prescribed for her had no effect. She was nothing now but a ghost with blurred features, her skin grey, her eyes full of stoic suffering.

Rokaya had the sickness of masterless people. She had contracted it in Turambo, when her home was a patched-up tent. At that time, the cauldron on the wooden fire only gurgled to stave off hunger. The flavourless crops grew once a year; the rest of the time we lived on roots and bitter acorns. By the age of five, Rokaya was looking after her grandfather’s one goat. One night, the goat’s throat had been torn out by a jackal because the pen hadn’t been properly closed. She had felt guilty about that all her life. Whenever misfortune struck us, she would say it was her fault — it was pointless to tell her that she was not to blame. At the age of fourteen, she was married off to a club-footed shepherd who beat her to make her submit to him. He knew he was the lowest of the low and had married her to make himself feel important. So when she so much as looked at him, he considered it an outrage. He died, killed by a bolt of lightning, and the villagers saw the hand of God in that thunderbolt from heaven. A widow at nineteen, she was remarried to another peasant who was just as bad. Her body would forever bear the marks of the mistreatment meted out to her during her second marriage. Rejected at the age of twenty-six, she was handed over for the third time to a pedlar who set off one morning to sell samovars and never came back, leaving his wife eight months pregnant. Rokaya gave birth to Nora in a barn, pushing with all her might, a cloth in her mouth to stifle her screams. At the age of forty-five, she was at the end of her tether. She looked twice her age. Her sickness had eaten her up inside with all the methodical greed of a colony of termites. I had always felt sorry for her. Her face bore the traces of an old sorrow that refused to vanish. It was through Rokaya that I had thought I understood that there are tragedies that obstinately remain on the surface, like ugly scars, in order not to fall into oblivion and thus be absolved of the harm they have caused … Because the damage returns as soon as it is forgiven, convinced it has been rehabilitated, and then it can no longer stop. Rokaya kept her wounds as open as her eyes, in order not to lose sight of even the slightest pain she had suffered for fear of not recognising it if it had the nerve to knock at her door again. Her face, in a sense, was a mirror where every ordeal displayed its duly paid bills. And the ordeals strove to make an inextricable parchment of her facial lines, all of which led back to the same original crime, that of a child of five who had neglected to close the pen where her family’s one goat was kept.

We had dinner in the main room, all four of us gathered round a low table, Rokaya lying a little further away in a corner. Mekki had merely given a little smile when he came home. He didn’t say a word to me. His status as head of the family spared him certain obligations. But he was pleased with my return to the fold. Nora had difficulty swallowing her spoonfuls of soup. My presence disturbed her. Or rather my gaze. I couldn’t stop glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, seeing nothing but her full mouth, which strove to silence what her eyes demanded. I too had grown up. I was nearly seventeen and well built, and whenever I smiled at my reflection in the mirror, my face displayed a kind of fleeting charm. Nora harboured feelings for me that went beyond pure innocence. Those nine months of separation had revealed us to ourselves. Our silence betrayed an inner feverishness that was too much for us. In our traditions, we didn’t know how to deal with those kinds of feeling. We let them simmer in secret and sometimes completely stifled them. They were feelings which were hard to bear and too dangerous to be brought out into the open. Words, in that platonic but intense debate, would have seemed indecently crude, since with us the senses were expressed in darkness. In that place, touch was more eloquent than poetry.

After dinner, Mekki claimed to have an appointment with his Mozabite partner and left; my mother cleared the table. Rokaya was already asleep. And it was that evening, taking advantage of a moment’s inattention, that I put my hand on Nora’s breasts. For the first time in my life, I touched the pulse of a fraction of eternity. Never would my fingers know a stronger sensation. Nora leapt back, startled by my gesture, but I could see in her wide eyes that she was flattered. She hastened to join my mother, while I retreated to the balcony, my heart racing, with the feeling that I held at the tips of my bold fingers, still heavy with Nora’s flesh, all the euphoria of the world.

In the morning, I had the impression that Medina Jedida was celebrating something. Faces were radiant and the sun-drenched streets seemed to have awoken to better days. In reality, it was I who was exultant. I had dreamt about Nora, and in my dream I had kissed her on the lips; as far as I was concerned, I had really kissed her. My mouth was anointed with an exquisite nectar. My chest was filled with joy, and my heart soared. Drained of all my venom, I had forgiven everything’. I even went to my uncle’s shop to show him I bore him no grudge. His partner, a Mozabite short in stature but enormously erudite, invited me to a café and we drank two pots of tea without realising it. He knew all the herbs and their qualities. I would listen to him for a few seconds then, between the names of flowers or aphrodisiac plants, the quivering image of Nora would catapult me through a thousand potential acts of daring.

It was after midday when the Mozabite took his leave of me.

I went back to Rue du Général-Cérez.

My mother was at the Ramouns’. Rokaya was dozing on her straw mattress. Nora was in the kitchen watching the cooking pot. I looked in all directions to make sure there was nobody else in the house. My cousin guessed what was going on in my head. She immediately became defensive. I approached her, my eyes riveted on her lips. She brandished her spatula. Her eyes did not reject mine, but it was a question of integrity. With us, love wasn’t paramount; it was subject to all kinds of proprieties and thus became almost a trial of strength. Nevertheless, I felt capable of climbing the sacred mountains and walking all over them, twisting the neck of convention, mocking the devil in his den. My body was in a frenzy. Nora backed into the wall, her spatula raised in front of her like a shield. I could see neither the barriers nor the wrong of it; I saw only her, and nothing else around us mattered. My face was an inch from hers, my mouth offering itself to her. I prayed with all my might that Nora would do the same and I waited for her lips to meet mine. Her breath mingled with mine but Nora did not yield. A tear rolled down her cheek and abruptly quenched the fire devouring me. ‘If you have any consideration for me, don’t do that,’ Nora said … I became aware of the extent of my selfishness. You don’t stamp on the sacred mountains. With my finger, I wiped the tears from my cousin’s cheek. ‘I think I came back earlier than expected,’ I said to save face. She looked down and nodded. I ran to rejoin the bustle of the streets. I was happy, and proud of my cousin. Her attitude had made her grow a hundredfold in my heart and in my mind.