Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

Since we didn’t know anyone, we had only ourselves to rely on.

I missed my father.

Strangely, I don’t remember ever seeing him up close. Ever since he’d come back from the war, his face shattered by a piece of shrapnel, he’d kept his distance, sitting all day long in the shade of a solitary tree. When my cousin Nora took him his meals, she’d approach him on tiptoe, as if she was feeding a wild animal. I waited for him to return to earth, but he refused to come down from his cloud of depression. After a while, I ended up confusing him with someone I may once have seen and eventually ignored him completely. His disappearance merely confirmed his absence.

And yet in Graba, I couldn’t help thinking about him every day.

Mekki promised we wouldn’t stay long in this shanty town if we worked hard and made enough money to rebuild our lives somewhere else. My mother and my aunt decided to start making biscuits, which my uncle would sell to cheap restaurants. I wanted to lend a hand — kids a lot weaker than me were working as porters, donkey drivers and soup vendors, and doing well — but my uncle refused to hire me. I was bright, he had to admit that, I just wasn’t bright enough to handle rascals capable of beating the devil himself at his own game. He was particularly afraid I’d be skinned alive by the first little runt I came across.

And so I was left to my own devices.

In Turambo, my mother had told me about dubious shanty towns inhabited by creatures so monstrous I had bad dreams about them, but I’d never imagined I’d end up in one of them one day. And now here I was, slap bang in the middle of one, but this was no bedtime story. Graba was like an open-air asylum. It was as if a tidal wave had swept across the hinterland and tons of human flotsam and jetsam had somehow been tossed here. Labourers and beasts of burden jostled each other in the same narrow alleys. The rumbling of carts and the barking of dogs created a din that made your head spin. The place swarmed with crippled veterans and unemployed ex-convicts, and as for beggars, they could moan until their voices gave out, they’d never get a grain of corn to put in their mouths. The only thing people had to share was bad luck.

Everywhere amid the rickety shacks, where every alley was an ordeal to walk down, snotty-nosed kids engaged in fierce organised battles. Even though they barely came up to your knee, they already had to fend for themselves, and the future they could look forward to was no brighter than their early years. The birthright automatically went to the one who hit hardest, and devotion to your parents meant nothing once you’d given your allegiance to a gang leader.

I wasn’t scared of these street urchins; I was scared of becoming like them. In Turambo, nobody swore, nobody looked their elders directly in the face; people showed respect, and if ever a kid got a bit carried away, you just had to clear your throat and he’d behave himself. But in this hellhole that stank of piss, every laugh, every greeting, every sentence came wrapped in obscenity.

It was in Graba that I first heard adults speak crudely.

The shopkeeper was getting some air outside his shack, his belly hanging down over his knees. A carter said, ‘So, fatty, when’s the baby due?’

‘God knows.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘A baby elephant,’ said the shopkeeper, putting his hand on his flies. ‘Want me to show you its trunk?’

I was shocked.

You couldn’t hear yourself breathe until the sun went down. Then the ghetto would wrap itself around its troubles and, soothed by the echoes of its foul acts, allow itself to fade into the darkness.

In Graba, night didn’t come, didn’t fall, but, rather, poured down as though from a huge cauldron of fresh tar; it cascaded from the sky, thick and elastic, engulfing hills and forests, pushing its blackness deep into our minds. For a few moments, like hikers caught unawares by an avalanche, people would fall abruptly silent. Not a sound, not a rustle in the bushes. Then, little by little, you would hear the crack of a strap, the clatter of a gate, the cry of a baby, kids squabbling. Life would slowly resume and, like termites nibbling at the shadows, the anxieties of the night would come to the surface. And just as you blew out the candle to go to sleep, you’d hear drunks yelling and screaming in the most terrifying way; anyone lingering on the streets had to hurry home if they didn’t want their bodies to be found lying in pools of blood early the following morning.

‘When are we going back to Turambo?’ I kept asking Mekki.

‘When the sea gives back to the land what it took away,’ he would answer with a sigh.

We had a neighbour in the shack opposite ours, a young widow of about thirty who would have been beautiful if only she’d taken a little care of herself. Always in an old dress, her hair in a mess, she’d sometimes buy bread from us on credit. She’d rush in, mutter an excuse, snatch her order from my mother’s hands and go back home as quickly as she’d come.

We thought she was strange; my aunt was sure the poor woman was possessed by a jinn.

This widow had a little boy who was also strange. In the morning, she’d take him outside and order him to sit at the foot of the wall and not move for any reason. The boy was obedient. He could stay in that blazing heat for hours, sweating and blinking his eyes, salivating over a crust of bread, with a vague smile on his face. Seeing him sitting in the same spot, nibbling at his mouldy piece of bread, made me so uneasy that I’d recite a verse to ward off the evil spirits that seemed to keep him company. Then, unexpectedly, he started following me from a distance. Whether I went to the scrub or the military dumping ground, every time I turned round I saw him right behind me, a walking scarecrow, his crust in his mouth. I’d try to chase him away, threatening him, even throwing stones at him, but he’d just retreat for a few moments then, at a bend in the path, reappear behind me, always keeping at a safe distance.

I went to see his mother and asked her to keep her kid tied up because I was tired of him always following me. She listened without interrupting, then told me he had lost his father and so he needed company. I told her I already found it hard to bear my own shadow. ‘It’s your choice,’ she sighed. I expected her to lose her temper like the other women in the neighbourhood whenever they disagreed with something, but she just went back to her chores as though nothing had happened. Her resignation made me feel sorry for her. I took the boy under my wing. He was older than me, but judging by the naive grin on his face, his brain must have been smaller than a pinhead. And he never spoke. I’d take him to the woods to pick jujubes or up the hill to look down at the railway tracks glittering among the stones. In the distance, you could see goatherds surrounded by their emaciated flocks and hear the little bells teasing the lethargic silence. Below the hill, there was a gypsy encampment, recognisable by its dilapidated caravans.

At night, the gypsies would light fires and pluck their guitars until dawn. Even though they mostly twiddled their thumbs the lids of their cooking pots were constantly clattering. I think their God must have been quite a good one. True, he didn’t exactly shower them with his benevolence, but at least he made sure they always had enough to eat.

We met Pedro the gypsy in the scrub. He was pretty much the same age as us and knew all the burrows where game went to hide. Once his basket was filled, he’d take out a sandwich and share it with us. We became friends. One day, he invited us to the camp. That’s how I learnt to take a close look at these tricksters whose food fell from the skies.

In spite of a quick temper, Pedro’s mother was basically good-natured. She was a fat redhead with a moustache, a lively temperament, and breasts so large you couldn’t tell where they stopped. She never wore anything under her dress, so when she sat on the ground you could see her pubic hair. Her husband was a broken-down septuagenarian who used an ear trumpet to hear and spent his time sucking at a pipe as old as the hills. He’d laugh whenever you looked at him, and open his mouth to reveal a single rotten tooth that made his gums look all the more repulsive. And yet in the evening, when the sun went down behind the mountains, the old man would wedge his violin under his chin and draw from the strings of his instrument laments that were the colour of the sunset and filled us with sweet melancholy. I’d never again hear anyone play the violin better than he did.