Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

The barber puts his equipment back into his bag. He’s in a hurry to leave, only too happy not to be forced to stay for the main attraction.

The imam places a noble hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t feel more crushed if a wall had fallen on me. He asks me if there’s a particular surah I’d like to hear. With a lump in my throat, I tell him I have no preference. He chooses the Surah ar-Rahman for me. His voice penetrates into the depths of my being and, by some strange alchemy, I find the strength to stand up.

The two guards order me to follow them.

We walk out into the corridor, followed by the committee. The clanking of my chains scraping the floor turns my shivers to razor cuts. The imam continues his chanting. His gentle voice is doing me good. I’m no longer afraid to walk in the dark, the Lord is with me. ‘Mout waguef! ’, an inmate says to me in a Kabyle accent. ‘ Ilik dh’arguez! ’, ‘Goodbye, Turambo,’ cries Bad-Luck Gégé, who’s only just out of solitary. ‘Hang on, brother. We’re coming …’ Other voices are raised, escorting me to my martyrdom. I stumble, but don’t fall. Fifty more metres, thirty … I must hang on till the end. Not just for myself but for the others. However reluctantly, I must set an example. Only the way I die can redeem a failed life. I’d like those who live on after me to talk about me with respect, to say that I left with my head held high.

My head held high?

At the bottom of a basket!

The only people who die with dignity are those who’ve fucked like rabbits, eaten like pigs, and blown all their money , Sid Roho used to say.

And what about those who are broke?

They don’t die, they just disappear.

The two guards are walking in front of me, quite impassive. The imam keeps on reciting his surah. My chains weigh a ton. The corridor hems me in on either side and I have to follow its confines.

The outside door is opened.

The cool air burns my lungs. The way the first gulp of air burns a baby’s lungs …

And there she is.

In a corner of the courtyard.

Tightly wrapped in cold and horror.

Like a praying mantis awaiting her feast.

I see her at last: Lady Guillotine. Stiff in her costume of iron and wood. With a lopsided grin. As repulsive as she’s fascinating. There she is, the porthole at the end of the world, the river of no return, the trap for souls in torment. Sophisticated and basic at one and the same time. In turn, a mistress of ceremonies and a street-corner whore. Whichever she is, she’s going to make sure you lose your head.

All at once, everything around me fades away. The prison walls disappear, the men and their shadows, the air stands still, the sky blurs. All that’s left is my heart pounding erratically and the Lady with the blade, the two of us alone, face to face, on a patch of courtyard suspended in the void.

I feel as if I’m about to faint, to fall apart and be scattered like a handful of sand in the wind. I’m grabbed by sturdy hands and put back together. I come to, fibre by fibre, shudder by shudder. There are constant flashes in my head. I see the village where I was born, ugly enough to repel both evil genies and manna from heaven, a huge enclosure haunted by beggars with glassy eyes and lips as disturbing as scars. Turambo! A godforsaken hole given over to goats and brats defecating in the open air and laughing at the strident salvoes from their emaciated rumps … I see Oran, like a splendid waterlily overhanging the sea, the lively trams, the souks and the fairs, the neon signs over the doors of nightclubs, girls as beautiful and unlikely as promises, whorehouses overrun with sailors as drunk as their boats … I see Irène on her horse, galloping across the ridges, Gino gushing blood on the staircase, two boxers beating the hell out of each other in the ring in front of a clamouring crowd, the Village Nègre and its inspired street performers, the shoeshine boys of Sidi Bel Abbès, my childhood friends Ramdane, Gomri, the Billy Goat … I see a young boy running barefoot over brambles, my mother putting her hands on her thighs in despair … Discordant voices crowd the black and white film, merging in a commotion that fills my head like scalding hail …

I’m pushed towards the guillotine.

I try and resist, but none of my muscles obey me. I walk to the guillotine as if levitating. I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I can’t feel anything. I think I’m already dead. A blinding white light has just seized me and flung me far, far back in time.

I owe my nickname to the shopkeeper in Graba.

The first time he saw me enter his lair, he looked me up and down, shocked by the state I was in and the way I smelt, and asked me if I came from the earth or the night. I was in bad shape, half dead from diarrhoea and exhaustion as a result of a long forced march across scrubland.

‘I’m from Turambo, sir.’

The shopkeeper smacked his lips, which were as thick as a buffalo frog’s. The name of my village meant nothing to him. ‘Turambo? Which side of hell is that on?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I need half a douro’s worth of yeast and I’m in a hurry.’

The shopkeeper turned to his half-empty shelves and, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger, repeated, ‘Turambo? Turambo? Never heard of it.’

From that day on, whenever I passed his shop, he’d cry out, ‘Hey, Turambo! Which side of hell is your village on?’ His voice carried such a long way that gradually everyone started calling me Turambo.

My village had been wiped off the map by a landslide a week earlier. It was like the end of the world. Wild lightning flashes streaked the darkness, and the thunder seemed to be trying to smash the mountains to pieces. You couldn’t tell men from animals any more; they were all tearing in every direction, screaming like creatures possessed. In a few hours, the torrents of rain had swept away our hovels, our goats and donkeys, our cries and prayers, and all our landmarks.

By morning, apart from the survivors shivering on the mud-covered rocks, nothing remained of the village. My father had vanished into thin air. We managed to dredge up a few bodies, but there was no trace of the broken face that had survived the deluge of fire and steel in the Great War. We followed the ravages of the flood as far as the plain, searched bushes and ravines, lifted the trunks of uprooted trees, but all in vain.

An old man prayed that the victims might be at rest, my mother shed a tear in memory of her husband, and that was it.

We considered putting everything back that had been scattered by the storm, but we didn’t have the means, or the strength to believe it was possible. Our animals were dead, our meagre crops were ruined, our zinc shelters and our zaribas were beyond repair. Where the village had been, there was nothing but a mudslide on the side of the mountain, like a huge stream of vomit.

After assessing the damage, my mother said to us, ‘Mortal man has only one fixed abode: the grave. As long as he lives, there’s nothing he can take for granted, neither home nor country.’

We bundled up the few things the disaster had deigned to leave us and set off for Graba, a ghetto area of Sidi Bel Abbès where wretches thrown off their lands by typhus or the greed of the powerful arrived by the score.

With my father gone, my young uncle Mekki, who wasn’t very far into his teens, declared himself the head of the family. He had a legitimate claim, being the eldest male.

There were five of us in a shack wedged between a military dumping ground and a scraggy orchard. There was my mother, a sturdy Berber with a tattooed forehead, not very beautiful but solid; my aunt Rokaya, whose pedlar husband had walked out on her over a decade earlier; her daughter Nora, who was more or less the same age as me; my fifteen-year-old uncle Mekki, and me, four years his junior.