Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

I don’t know where I went that day, or how I managed to stay upright until Gino returned.

‘I’m seriously in love,’ I confided in him while he was changing in his room.

‘Nothing is serious about love,’ Madame Ramoun said from her bed.

Gino frowned. He gestured to me to lower my voice. We both laughed up our sleeves like two impudent children caught in the act. I glanced over my shoulder. Madame Ramoun had a broad smile on her sweat-streaked face.

‘I need a job,’ I said to Gino. ‘To become a man.’

‘Is that the condition your lady love has set you?’ he teased me, laughing.

‘It’s my condition for being worthy of her. I want to have a life, don’t you understand? Up until now all I’ve done is drift.’

‘I can see you’ve got it bad.’

‘I have! I don’t even know where I am any more.’

‘You lucky dog.’

‘Couldn’t you have a word with your boss?’

‘You don’t know anything about motor mechanics, and old Bébert is a bit of a stickler about things like that.’

‘I’ll learn.’

Gino pursed his lips in embarrassment, but promised to see what he could do.

He managed to persuade his boss to take me on as an apprentice.

Old Bébert told me straight away that I was to watch the others at work and not touch anything. He first asked me a lot of questions about the jobs I had done, about my family, whether I was ill and whether I had a criminal record. Next, he showed me the barrels for storing used oil, the broom cupboard and the cleaning materials and immediately put me to the test. As Gino was busy working on the innards of a large car, half buried under the bonnet, I had to get on with it by myself and familiarise myself as quickly as possible with the different sections of the garage. Old Bébert watched me from his booth, one eye on his registers, the other on what I was doing.

At about one o’clock, Gino took me to a kiosk where you could sit at a table and order sandwiches. I wasn’t hungry; instead I was wondering if the stale air of the garage suited me. I felt a bit out of my depth among those stubborn mechanics. Gino sensed I was disorientated and talked about all kinds of things just to lighten the atmosphere.

Three young Roumis were lounging on the terrace. The fair-haired one stopped stirring his coffee when he saw us take our seats at the next table.

‘Arabs aren’t allowed here,’ he said.

‘He’s with me,’ Gino said.

‘And who are you?’

‘We’re not looking for trouble. We just want a bite to eat.’

His two companions looked us up and down. They didn’t seem inclined to leave us alone.

‘They should put a sign up over the door,’ the youngest of the three said. ‘Dogs and Arabs not allowed.’

‘What’d be the point? They can’t read.’

‘In that case, why don’t they stay in their own pen?’

‘They can’t keep still either. God created Arabs to piss everyone off.’

Gino hailed the waiter, a dark-skinned adolescent, and gave him our order.

The fair-haired Roumi was looking at my clothes and sniggering. ‘What’s the difference between an Arab and a potato?’ he said. After looking around the table with an affected air, he cried, ‘A potato can be cultivated.’

His two companions laughed sardonically.

‘I didn’t quite get that,’ I said to the fair-haired one, ignoring Gino’s hand under the table trying to restrain me.

‘There’s no point even trying. You’ve been playing with yourself so much, you’ve addled your brains.’

‘Are you insulting me?’

‘Let it go,’ Gino said.

‘He’s not showing respect.’

‘No kidding!’ the fair-haired one retorted, leaving his table. He towered over me. ‘Do you even know what respect is?’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Gino begged me, already on his feet.

I heaved a sigh and was getting ready to leave when the Roumi caught hold of the collar of my shirt. ‘Where do you think you’re going, you Arab scum? I haven’t finished with you yet.’

‘Listen,’ Gino said, trying to reason with him, ‘we don’t want any trouble.’

‘I’m not talking to you. Watch your step, okay?’ He turned back to me. ‘Well, Arab, cat got your tongue? Apart from playing with yourself, what else can you do with your hands, you little —?’

He didn’t finish his sentence. My fist catapulted him over the table. He span round amid the cups and bottles and collapsed to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and crockery, his nose smashed and his arms outstretched.

‘I can punch,’ I said in reply to his last question.

The other two clowns raised their hands in surrender. Gino pulled me firmly by the wrist and we walked back up the boulevard to the garage.

Gino was angry with me. ‘Bébert doesn’t want any trouble in the neighbourhood. I moved heaven and earth to get him to agree to try you out.’

‘What did you want me to do? Let that idiot wipe the floor with me?’

‘He was just a layabout. I admit he was asking for it, but it wasn’t necessary. You have to learn when it’s best just to leave it, Turambo. If you start dwelling on the things that make you angry, you won’t get far. You have a trade to learn, with a possible job at the end of it. So be patient and, above all, be reasonable. There are pests like that on every street corner. You could spend your life knocking them out, but they’d only keep coming. They annoy me too; I may not make a big deal out of it, but it’s not for lack of self-respect.’

Old Bébert virtually worshipped his customers’ cars. He handled them as if they were made of nitroglycerine or porcelain. He even sometimes polished them in places with the end of his apron. His customers came from the city’s nouveaux riches, people who cared about appearances and displayed their social status like war veterans displaying their medals, proud of the struggle that had led them from the gutter to the heights when nobody would have given them much chance of survival.

You had to see these toffs leaving their cars with us. So many detailed instructions, insistent recommendations, adamant warnings. They wouldn’t leave the garage until they had made sure that their ‘gem’ was in good hands, promising large tips to the deserving and a thunderbolt from heaven for the slightest scratch on the bodywork.

Bébert kept an eye on things. He had surrounded himself with a team of four hand-picked specialist mechanics whom he ruled with a rod of iron and pushed hard. He had given me simple jobs to do: changing the wheels, cleaning the seats and the floors, polishing the bodywork and other safe little things, which didn’t stop me watching the others working because I wanted to learn the trade.

The team ended up adopting me. There were two old mechanics who had worked in factories, a young Corsican named Filippi who knew engines like the back of his hand, and Gino. The atmosphere was good and we worked relentlessly, telling each other a load of gossip about such and such a nabob and jokes that kept us human among the scrap iron and the smells of fuel.

After a few months, Bébert put me together with Gino. At last I had the right to touch the innards beneath the bonnets. I could connect a hose, replace a coil, clean a carburettor, adjust a headlight.

I was earning decent money, and not once had I been lectured by the boss.

But this respite was not to last.

It was about four in the afternoon. We were on schedule to deliver a superb vehicle which a customer had entrusted to us for a complete overhaul, a Citroën B14 touring car that looked as if it had come straight off the assembly line. Its owner, a red-headed muscle man with a broken nose, was crazy about it. He couldn’t stop running his finger over the bonnet to wipe away imperceptible specks of dust. When he came back for it and saw it waiting for him, all shiny and new, in the middle of the garage, he put his hands on his hips and stood there gazing at it for a while, then turned to his companion to see if he was as impressed as he was. ‘Lovely, isn’t she, my old crock? Girls won’t be able to resist me.’ Then he opened the door and his face suddenly turned dark red. ‘What’s this shit?’ he roared, pointing to a grease stain on the white leather seat. Gino came running to have a look. The customer took him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. ‘Do you know how much my old crock cost? You could spend your whole life forging banknotes and you wouldn’t be able to afford her, you slob.’ I grabbed a cloth and rushed over to wipe the seat, but all that did was to spread the grease further on the leather. Horrified by my clumsiness, the customer uttered a fierce curse and, letting go of Gino, gave me a slap that made me spin round. Gino didn’t have time to grab me round the waist. My arm threw a lightning hook and the customer collapsed like a house of cards. He writhed weakly on the floor, shuddered two or three times and went stiff. His companion stood there petrified, leaning back as if about to retreat. The mechanics stopped what they were doing and looked at us open-mouthed. Gino lifted his hands to his temples, devastated; I guessed that I had just committed a capital crime. Old Bébert burst out of his booth, white-faced with panic. He pushed me aside and bent over the customer. In the icy silence of the garage, all that could be heard was the heavy breathing of old Bébert, who didn’t know which to tear out: his hair or my eyes. ‘Have you gone mad?’ he screamed at me, rising again to his full height, shaking from head to foot. ‘You dare raise your hand to a customer, you toerag, you maggot? Is that how you repay me? I give you a job and you attack my customers? I don’t want to see you again. Get out of here. Go back to your cave until the police come for you. Because, trust me, you’re going to pay for this.’ I threw the cloth on the ground and went to get changed. Bébert ran after me, continuing to insult me while I took off my overalls and put my street clothes back on. His salivating mouth sprayed me with spittle and his eyes had a murderous look in them. He went back and helped the customer to his feet. The man was still dazed and couldn’t stand up straight. They put him in his car as best they could and his companion immediately started the engine. When the car left the garage, Bébert laid into Gino. He blamed him for my behaviour, held him responsible for the consequences of my attack and told him that he too was fired.