Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

‘You raped her, then strangled her,’ the sergeant cried.

‘It was the devil, not me. Why else would I have given myself up as soon as I came to my senses?’

‘You didn’t give yourself up, you confessed. There’s a difference, you piece of shit.’

I don’t know if it was my cry or the thunder that shook the station from top to bottom, if I threw myself on Jérôme or if I only imagined myself tearing him to pieces with my bare hands. I don’t know if the policemen tore me off him, hitting me with their truncheons, or if I hurt myself falling. I only remember the blackness that followed. Nothing in front of me, nothing behind, nothing to right or left. The sky, the whole sky had fallen on my head with its billions of stars, its millions of prayers and its armies of demons. I cursed myself as no damned soul has ever been cursed. I had killed Gino for nothing, and killed the whole world with him. I could no longer hear myself breathe. My breath was denying me. I had aged several millennia. I was a mummy deprived of its rotten bandages, I was Cain emerged from the ashes of hell, his murder more stupid than the destiny of men. What have you done? cried a voice going round and round inside me. How are you going to live now? On what? Who for? Your sleep will be made of black holes, your days of funeral pyres. You can pray until your voice gives out, recite the incantations of all the magicians on earth, deck yourself with talismans or disappear in a wreath of incense; you can read the holy verses all day long, put thorns on your head and walk on water, you won’t change the fate awaiting you one iota.

I can’t remember if I took my leave of Ventabren or if the cops threw me out. It seemed to me I had gone through time in a single stride, my own cries following me like a hostile crowd. I drove, drove without knowing where I was heading. I stopped under a tree to weep. Not a sob emerged. Not a hiccup. Evening was coming; I saw nothing but my own night, that cold milky darkness taking root in my being like a slow death. I don’t know how I ended up at Camélia’s. I drank like a fish, I who had never lifted a glass of wine to my lips. Aïda was embarrassed. She was expecting someone. While waiting, she plunged me in a bathtub and rubbed my body as if trying to erase me. Wrapped in a towel, I sat down in the armchair and continued drinking. Shadowy figures moved in slow motion around me. I heard voices without understanding them. Camélia was asking Aïda to get rid of me. My mind was elsewhere; it was still at the station at Lourmel, leaning over Jérôme as he wept. I should have finished that lecher off, thrown myself on him and not let go until I’d crushed him. I was angry with myself for listening to his confession without reacting, even though he had thrown my life into an abyss. Aïda went to fetch more wine. An ocean wouldn’t have been enough to extinguish the inferno engulfing me. The more I drank, the lighter I felt; I swam above a sea of vapours and dizziness, my heart in an eagle’s talon, my eyes like spinning tops. My teeth chattered as I sat in my towel, unable to make a move without knocking something over. Aïda ignored me. Sitting on a wing chair at her dressing table, she was making herself beautiful for the evening. I saw her back as a rampart excluding me from the world of the living. ‘You have to go home now,’ she said when the time came. ‘My client’s waiting in the parlour.’ ‘He can go to hell!’ I heard myself grunt. ‘My money’s as good as his.’ She protested. I threatened to blow up the whole place. Camélia didn’t want a rumpus or a scandal in her establishment. She offered me a room. I refused to leave my armchair. Aïda had to see her client in another room. I waited for her to come back. The walls started swaying around me. I dozed off, or maybe I’d fainted. When I woke up, dawn was filtering through the blinds. Aïda wasn’t in her bed. I got up and went out to call her in the corridor. ‘Aïda! Aïda!’ My cries were meant as explosions. I was choking with anger, a storm of drunkenness. Obtaining no reply, I started hammering at the doors, from one end of the corridor to the other, then kicking them down. Prostitutes ran out into the corridor, terrified, some completely naked; clients appeared here and there, also woken up and furious. One of them tried to stop me. Others lent him a hand. I hit out violently to push them away, continuing to call Aïda. Arms seized me round the waist, fingers caught me round the throat, fists rained down on me. I hit out in a tornado of curses, wild, stark raving mad … Something smashed on my skull. I just had time to see Aïda go down with me as I fell, the handle of a jug in her hand.

Coming to, I realised that I was tied up at the foot of the stairs, with blood on my body and one black eye. The prostitutes and their clients formed a circle around me in stony silence. Uniformed police officers surrounded me, truncheons at the ready. A motionless body was being laid on a stretcher. In the scuffle, I had killed a man.

I didn’t remember a thing.

I didn’t know my victim. Had I hit him in the wrong place, thrown him down the stairs by accident? Had he slipped on a step during the fight? What did it matter? The unknown man lay there, glassy-eyed, a streak of blood on his chin.

When a misfortune happens, there’s no way out.

It was written somewhere that it had to finish this way.

Wedged between two policemen in the back seat of the car, I felt myself slipping into a parallel world from which there was no turning back. The handcuffs chafed my wrists. The rancid smell of the two policemen choked me — or maybe it was my own smell. What did it matter? I had killed a man, and that had sobered me up.

‘Do you know who you killed? A national hero, one of the most decorated officers in the Great War. It’s the guillotine for you, boy …’

My body shook.

‘Go on, laugh,’ one of the policemen said, elbowing me in the side. ‘We’ll see how long you laugh when your head rolls into the basket.’

I wasn’t laughing: I was sobbing.

It was fully daylight now, dazzling white. A limpid sky rolled out the carpet for the rising sun. Early risers hurried along the streets, dazed with sleep. A shopkeeper raised the iron shutter of his shop with a din that shatterd the morning silence. He adjusted his smock before hanging his pole on a hook. A traffic policeman whistled at a carter whose horse was refusing to move out of the way. A group of nuns crossed the road quickly. For all of them, it would be a day like any other. For me, nothing would ever be the same again. Life was going on, supreme in its banality. Mine was escaping from me in a puff of smoke. I thought of my mother. What was she doing right now? I imagined her sitting on a mat, watching my father sink into madness. My father! Would he ever see off his ghosts? Would the noise of machine guns and bombs die down at last and allow him to listen to the furtive course of time passing? In front of me, the flabby, wrinkled neck of the driver reminded me of a broken accordion. It was as if the weight of his thoughts was pressing on his neck. The police car drove past a market, past the Douniazed cinema, which was showing a comedy film. A vendor of torraicos was lining up his cones on his makeshift stall. Soon, urchins would start prowling around his little cart, looking for an opportunity to rob him. The driver hooted his horn to clear a path through the pedestrians; a pointless gesture because the way was already clear. Through the windscreen, I could see the prison waiting for me, implacable; I could smell the stench of the damp gloom where cries would have no echoes, where remorse would be nothing more than a cellmate or a pet, my Siamese twin.

I thought of Edmond Bourg, the author of The Miracle Man, the savage way he had killed his wife and her lover, the blade that had jammed on the day of his execution, the revered priest the murderer had become … Would I too be entitled to a miracle? I would so much like to wake up to a future washed clean of my sins. I probably wouldn’t be a priest or an imam, but I would never again raise my hand to my fellow man. I would pay a lot of attention to my friends and I wouldn’t respond to the provocations of my enemies. I would live without anger, generous, holding on to what was essential, and I would be able to find peace everywhere I went. Of Irène, I would have a tender memory, of Gino a fervent repentance; I promised to submit to test after test without complaint if such was the price for deserving to survive with the people who were dear to me, the people I wasn’t able to keep.