Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

I took an instant dislike to the place. It stank of mould and defeat.

Just as I was about to leave, a tall, thin man emerged from the toilets, hopping on a wooden leg. ‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked, walking back to the table near the door.

‘De Stefano.’

‘He’s busy. What’s it about?’

‘He asked me to come by.’

‘Was it De Stefano who asked for you and not somebody else?’

I didn’t reply. Doormen often grant themselves an authority they don’t have and shamelessly abuse it. He waved me to a bench.

‘You chose the wrong time, son. At this hour of the day, they’re either eating or sleeping.’

He collapsed onto his chair and started biting into his sandwich.

The two men in the cubicle were still arguing.

‘Why does he call me a monkey?’ one of them said excitedly. ‘Did he pick me off a tree?’

I recognised De Stefano’s voice saying, ‘You know what they’re like at Le Petit Oranais . They aren’t journalists, they’re madmen and racists. They hate wops. Plus, they’re jealous.’

‘Are you sure it’s because they’re jealous, and not because I’m Portuguese?’

‘Absolutely. That’s the way the world is: there are those who become legends and those who make lots of noise because that’s all they can do.’

The doorman swallowed his last mouthful, washed it down with a gulp of water, let out a formidable belch, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said to me in a low voice, ‘Rodrigo’s a nutcase. He’s never been in a ring in his life. He’s made up this idea that he’s a champion and he believes it totally. When he’s having one of his attacks, he comes here and drives us all up the wall. He tells everyone the press are giving him a hard time, that he’s had enough, and so on and so on, and De Stefano likes to tell him he sympathises and tries to encourage him …’

I nodded out of politeness.

‘I think De Stefano gets a kick out of it,’ the doorman went on. ‘He thinks he’s really encouraging a champion and that makes him feel he’s important. He used to be big. He had a whole lot of promising fighters in his stable. Then it all fizzled out, and all he’s left with is nostalgia. So he keeps Rodrigo around in order not to lose the thread, and waits for the good old days to come back …’

The little door of the cubicle opened and a gangling, pale-eyed individual in a threadbare jacquard pullover and a pair of crumpled trousers came out, strutted across the room, saluting the poster of a champion as he passed it, and went out into the street without taking any notice of us.

De Stefano opened his arms wide to greet me. ‘So you made your mind up at last …’

In the street, Rodrigo started shouting abuse at us.

‘That’s Rodrigo,’ De Stefano said. ‘A former champion.’

Behind him, the tall, thin man wagged his finger to deny this.

‘Well, Turambo? To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘You asked me to come by, so here I am.’

‘Congratulations! I promise you won’t regret it.’

‘I don’t see anyone here …’

‘It isn’t time yet. Most of our boxers have to work to make ends meet. But in the evening, it’s bedlam, I can assure you …’ Then, turning to the doorman, ‘Did you deliver the package, Tobias?’

‘Not yet. There’s nobody to mind the shop.’

‘Go now. You know how Toni is. He doesn’t like being neglected. Take Turambo with you. That way, he’ll find a few boys in the ring when he gets back. And tell the baker to send me a snack. I’ll take over; try not to dawdle, please.’

Tobias started to clear the table, but De Stefano told him he’d take care of it and pointed to a package in the corner.

‘Can you carry it for me?’ Tobias asked me. ‘It isn’t heavy, but with my wooden leg …’

‘No problem,’ I said, picking up the package.

Tobias walked fast; his wooden leg banged on the road surface and made him lurch to the side.

‘Did you lose your leg in an accident?’

‘In a garden,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I stepped on a seed, the seed got embedded in the sole of my foot, and in the morning, when I woke up, a wooden leg had grown under my thigh.’

We walked in silence for a while. Tobias was very well known. Everywhere we went, people greeted him. He would trade insults with some, jokes with others, and throw his head back in a shrill laugh. He was a handsome man, very clean beneath his old clothes; without his disability, he could have passed for a commercial traveller or a postman.

‘I left my leg on a battlefield, at Verdun,’ he admitted suddenly.

‘You were in the war?’

‘Like millions of other fools.’

‘And what’s it like?’

He wiped his forehead on his forearm and asked me to pause because of his wooden leg, which was starting to torment him. He sat down on a low wall to catch his breath. ‘You want to know what war is like?’

‘Yes,’ I said, in the hope of understanding a little of what had happened to my father.

‘I can’t make any comparison. It isn’t like anything else. It’s a bit like every nightmare, and no nightmare could describe it. You’re simultaneously in a slaughterhouse, a bullring, a chamber of horrors, down the bottom of a toilet and in hell, except that your pains never end.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘I had two. I don’t know where they are. Their mother walked out on me while I was trying to survive in that abattoir.’

‘Haven’t you tried to find them?’

‘I’m too tired.’

‘I had a father. He was a good man. When he came back from the war, he deserted his family. He left us one night and abandoned us in the mud.’

‘Yes, that kind of reaction is common. War is a strange kind of excursion. You go to it to the sound of bugles, and you come back in the skin of a ghost, your head full of noises, and don’t know what to do with your shitty life afterwards.’

He pointed to a monument behind us and an equestrian statue in a little park at the corner of the street.

‘All those statues tell us about the madness of men. When we put flowers on them on Remembrance Day, all we’re doing is hiding our faces and lying to ourselves. We don’t honour the dead, we disturb them. Look at that statue of a general over there. What is it saying? Just that however much we fight and burn towns and fields, slaughter people while proclaiming victory, and make the tears of widows flow, the heroes end up on marble pedestals for pigeons to shit on …’

He pulled up his trouser leg and adjusted his prosthesis. His brow furrowed.

‘I’ve never understood how each generation can allow itself to be deceived. I suppose the nation is more important than the family. Well, I don’t agree. You can have as many nations as you like, but if you don’t have a family, you’re nobody.’

He pulled down his trouser leg with an abrupt gesture. The furrow on his forehead deepened.

‘Amazing, isn’t it? You carry on with your daily routine, calmly, you cultivate your garden, you put your meagre savings away in a safe place, and in a corner of your head you make plans, modest plans, as small as a wisp of straw. You look after your kids, convinced it’s going to be that way till death do us part. Then, all at once, some high-ranking strangers you’ve never met decide your fate. They take away your little dreams and land you in the middle of their crazy scheme. That’s war. You don’t know why it’s there, but you fall into it like a hair into soup. By the time you realise what’s going on, the storm has passed. When the light comes back on, you no longer recognise what was there.’

He hauled himself up.

‘War is only an adventure for those fools who believe a medal is worth a life. I wasn’t the king of the world before, but I didn’t complain. I was a railway worker; I had a home and reasons to hope. Then something got into me and I left everything to wave a flag and march to the sound of drums. Obviously, that threw my life off course. I don’t blame anyone. That’s the way it is, and that’s that. If I had to do it all over again, I’d pour wax in my ears so that I couldn’t hear the bugles, or the orders, or the cannon fire … Nothing is worth a life, my boy, neither glory nor a page in the history books, and no field of honour can equal a woman’s bed.’