Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

My mother tried to put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. She shook it off with a gesture of disgust. ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want your pity. Pity never fed anyone. I don’t need anybody any more. Now that my son’s gone, I can go too. I’ve been wanting to put an end to this lousy life for years. But my son wasn’t right in the head. I couldn’t see him surviving among people who are worse than wolves … I can’t wait to have a word with the One who created me just to make me suffer.’

‘Are you mad? What are you talking about? It’s a sin to kill yourself.’

‘I don’t think there could possibly be a hell worse than mine, either in the sky or anywhere else.’

She looked up at me and it was as if the distress of the whole of humanity was concentrated in her eyes.

‘Torn to pieces by a train! My God! How can I do away with a child like that after putting him through so much?’

I was speechless, upset by her ranting.

She pressed down on the palms of her hands and got unsteadily to her feet. ‘Show me where my baby is. Is there anything left of him for me to bury?’

‘He isn’t dead!’ I cried.

She shuddered. Her eyes struck me with the ferocity of lightning. ‘What? Did you leave my son bleeding on the railway tracks?’

‘He wasn’t run over by the train. We got on it, and when the train started, I jumped off and he stayed on. I shouted to him to jump but he didn’t dare. I ran after the train and walked along the rails, but he didn’t get off anywhere.’

The widow put her head in her hands. Once again, she didn’t seem to understand. Suddenly, she stiffened. I saw her facial expression go from confusion to relief, then from relief to panic, and then from panic to hysteria. ‘Oh, God! My son is lost! They’ll eat him alive. He doesn’t even know how to hold out his hand. Oh, my God! Where’s my baby?’

She took me by the throat and started to shake me, almost dislocating my neck. My mother and aunt tried to get me away from her; she pushed them back with a kick and, totally losing her mind, started screaming and spinning like a tornado, knocking down everything in her path. Suddenly, she howled and collapsed, her eyes rolled back, her body convulsed.

My mother got up. She had scratches all over. With amazing calm, she fetched a large jailer’s key and slipped it into the widow’s fist — a common practice with people who fainted from dizziness or shock.

Dumbfounded, my aunt ordered her daughter to go and fetch Mekki before the madwoman returned to her senses.

Mekki didn’t beat about the bush. Nora had told him everything. He was all fired up and didn’t want to hear any more. In our family, you hit first, and then you talked. You bastard, I’m going to kill you . He rushed at me and started beating me up. I thought he’d never stop.

My mother didn’t intervene.

It was men’s business.

Having beaten me thoroughly, my uncle ordered me to take him to the railway track and show him the direction the train had gone in. I could barely stand. The ballast had injured my feet, and the beating had finished me off.

‘How am I supposed to look for him in the dark?’ Mekki cursed, leaving the shack.

At dawn, Mekki wasn’t back. The widow came to ask for news every five minutes, in a state of mental collapse.

Three days passed and still there was nothing on the horizon. After a week, we began to fear the worst. My aunt was constantly on her knees, praying. My mother kept going round in circles in the one room that made up our house. ‘I suppose you’re proud of yourself,’ she grunted, resisting the impulse to hit me. ‘You see where your mischief has landed us? It’s all your fault. For all we know, the jackals have long since chewed your uncle’s bones. What will become of us without him?’

Just when we were beginning to lose hope, we heard the widow cry out. It was about four in the afternoon. We ran out of the shack. Mekki could barely stand up, his face was dark, and he was covered in dirt. The widow was hugging her child tightly to her, pulling up his gaiters to see if he was hurt, feeling his scalp for any bumps or injuries; the boy showed the effects of wandering and hunger, but was safe and sound. He was staring at me dull-eyed, and pointing his finger at me the way you point at a culprit.

Ogres are nothing but hallucinations born of our superstitions, and an excuse for them, which is why we are no better than they are, because, as both false witnesses and stern judges, we often condemn before deliberating.

The ogre known as Graba wasn’t as monstrous as all that.

From the hill that served as my vantage point, I had seen its people as plague victims and its slums as deadly traps. I was wrong. Seen from close up, the ghetto was simply living as best it could. It might have seemed like purgatory, but it wasn’t. In Graba, people weren’t paying for their crimes or their sins, they were just poor, that was all.

Driven by boredom and idleness, I started venturing further and further into the ghetto. I was just beginning to feel part of it when I had my baptism of fire. Which of course I’d been expecting.

A carter offered me a douro to help him load about a hundred bundles of wood onto his cart. Once the job was done, he paid me half the promised sum, swearing on his children’s heads that it was all he had on him. He seemed sincere. I was watching him walk away when a voice behind me cried out, ‘Are you trying to muscle in on my territory?’

It was the Daho brothers. They were barring my way.

I sensed things were about to go downhill. Peerless street fighters, they reigned supreme over the local kids. Whenever a boy came running through the crowd, his face reduced to a pulp, it meant the Dahos weren’t far away. They were only twelve or thirteen, but talked through the sides of their mouths like old lags. Behind them, their bodyguards rubbed their hands at the prospect of a thrashing. The Daho brothers couldn’t just go on their way. Wherever they stopped, blood had to flow. It was the rule. Kings hate truces, and the twins didn’t believe in taking a well-earned rest. Squat and faun-like, their faces so identical you felt you were seeing the same disaster twice, they were as fast as whips and just as sharp. Adults nicknamed them Gog and Magog, two irredeemable little pests bound to end up on the scaffold as surely as ageing virgins were destined to marry their halfwit cousins. There was no getting away from them and I was angry with myself for having crossed their path.

‘I don’t want to fight,’ I said.

This spontaneous surrender was greeted with sardonic laughter.

‘Hand over what you’ve got in your pocket.’

I took out the coin the carter had given me and held it out. My hand was steady. I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wanted to get home in one piece.

‘You have to be nuts to be content with this,’ Daho One said, weighing my earnings contemptuously in his hand. ‘You don’t move a cartload of stuff for half a douro, you little toerag. Any idiot would have asked for three times this much.’

‘I didn’t know,’ I said apologetically.

‘Turn out your pockets, now.’

‘I’ve already given you everything I have.’

‘Liar.’

I could see in their eyes that confiscating my pay was just the start and that what mattered was the thrashing. I immediately went on the defensive, determined to give as good as I got. The Daho brothers always hit first, without warning, hoping to take their victim by surprise. They would strike simultaneously, in a perfectly synchronised movement, with a headbutt to the nose and a kick between the legs to disconcert their prey. The rest was just a formality.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ a providential voice rang out. ‘A whole bunch of you picking on a little kid?’